


Say Goodbye

by NightShadeQueen



Series: posse comitatus [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bags of Holding, Case Fic, Gen, Magical Theory, Reconstruction, The Deathly Hallows, Worldbuilding, and camping (?), democratic norms, infidelity (?), just about everyone is crazy-prepared, magical opsec, the intersection between the magical and muggle worlds
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-08-04 13:56:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16348001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightShadeQueen/pseuds/NightShadeQueen
Summary: It's a lot easier to say you're going to die peacefully than to, you know, actually die peacefully. Especially if your name is Harry James Potter. Harry is murdered, in all likelihood for the Elder Wand, and newly-minted Minister of Magic Hermione and Deputy Head Auror Ron must track down the culprit before everything falls apart. But to do so, they’ll have to navigate a complex political landscape, ancient grudges, and nearly a millennium of history. Muggle and magical. Featuring: democratic norms, magical detective work, the Deathly Hallows, constant vigilance, too many farewells, and the precise definition of love. Canon pairings. Ignoring epilogue.





	1. Empty Quiver

**Author's Note:**

> This is a bit of an odd story. It started with one plot bunny (someone murders Harry for the Elder Wand, Hermione uses the Resurrection Stone to bring him back temporarily, and the Golden Trio hunts down the perp) but then about a dozen more plot bunnies showed up, so it kind of winds all over the place. While there is a plot, there’s also a lot of...attempted worldbuilding. The bulk of the story takes place about twelve years after _Deathly Hallows_ , with some flashbacks to earlier, and there are quite a few original characters who basically decided that they also wanted a backstory. The story started out being about death and euthanasia; it ended up with the additional theme of infidelity in all its forms with a side of automation and databases. It stars newly-minted Minister of Magic Hermione and Deputy Head Auror Ron, with a side of surprisingly-badass Ginny and smatterings of other Weasleys and Dumbledore’s Army members. It starts very slowly – there is a lot of background to cover – but there is a plot in here, _somewhere._
> 
> I started writing this ages ago (before _Cursed Child_ definitely), and I’ve never been a fan of _Pottermore_ , and this is not epilogue-compliant, but otherwise I think it should be reasonably canon-compliant to the books (but not to the movies or anything else). I also assume that events that happen in the Muggle world do also occur, including which politicians get elected/appointed at which time, although there are no real-person characters. I have tried my best to reconstruct the political climate of 2010, but there’s almost certainly something I screwed up. This hasn’t even been South California-picked, never mind Brit-picked, and I’m terrible at writing accents, so we’ll just assume that Fleur got better at English in the intervening twelve years.
> 
> Somewhat inspired by [Breaking Benjamin's “Dance With the Devil.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMSkC2PGyTs) Not nearly as grimdark as the warnings imply.
> 
>  **Pairings:** Canon. (Also, gay and lesbian OCs, because I apparently can’t write a straight original character to save my life.)
> 
>  **Warnings:** Character death. Description of homicide scenes. Infidelity. (Historical) homophobia. Islamophobia and anti-Vietnamese sentiments (discussed, slurs used). PTSD. Descriptions of war and combat, both magical and Muggle, including massacres and both napalm and missile strikes. Several characters carry and use guns. Substance abuse (and generally-illegal drugs used as experimental psychology medications). Sexual assault and domestic violence are vaguely discussed, but no details and no flashbacks, although lust potions are mentioned.
> 
> Some characters have political opinions. Those opinions do not necessarily reflect my own.
> 
> And, as always: I am not a lawyer. I am not a doctor. Do not take medical or legal advice from this.

* * *

_“E2.1.10. EMPTY QUIVER. A reporting term to identify and report the seizure, theft, or loss of a U.S. nuclear weapon.”_  
[DoD Directive 5230.16](https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=411): Nuclear Accident and Incident Public Affairs (PA) Guidance

* * *

_Wednesday, 10 March 2010_

Hermione Weasley, _neé_ Granger, walks around the ruins of Hogwarts for the second time of her life, picking her way between collapsed staircases and fallen walls. The caterwauling of many damaged portraits fills her ears. There's a cold, damp wind on her skin; it carries the acrid smell of burnt fabric. Last time, she'd felt lost and confused among the wreckage of the grand castle and the ruins of the wizarding world after Voldemort was done with it.

This time, well, she's seen it before. She's seen just how fast the magic of Hogwarts could put the castle back up again, slotting the many stones back together as quickly as a kid could put together a LEGO castle, how the wizarding world came back together, Muggleborns and purebloods alike over the corpse of Lord Voldemort, He-Who-Ran-From-Death, how her generation had somehow managed to knit together despite a millennium of bigotry. It wasn't smooth sailing, but it happened. Somehow.

Hogwarts would survive. For now, at least.

She looks down at the ring in her hands, studying the gold band and black stone intensely. It’d taken all day and all night, and she’d ignored sixteen different messages from Vera, but she’d managed to find it; she’d set out immediately for it after Ginny floo’ed Ron yesterday morning. There are three Hallows. The ring. The cloak. The wand. And they said that the one who ruled over all three also ruled over death; they'd spent years thinking that that was Harry James Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, the man who defeated the Dark Lord of this half-century, master of all three Hallows.

Harry James Potter, Master of Death, they'd whispered back and forth to themselves. They've all heard of the fairy tales; the ones who hadn't grown up listening to them certainly spent many a night tiredly reciting them to their own children, and they've wondered what that meant, what he was, what he could do. Immortality isn’t impossible in the magic world, but somehow Hermione always doubted that was what the title meant.

But she knows now. Those fairy tales were lies. Death bows to no master and no amount of magic can protect anyone from him forever.

Twelve years ago, Hermione had walked in the ruins of the same castle, and she had asked Harry, “What are you going to do with the Elder Wand?”

He had simply looked into her eyes and told her, “I plan to die peacefully.” Simply. Easily. And they buried the wand again with Dumbledore because as far as any of them were concerned, it was Dumbledore's. Even now, Hermione remembers this as clear as day; the house elves singing for their fallen brethren, witches and wizards crying for the deceased, McGonagall chanting spell after spell, the castle reassembling itself, the trees of the Forbidden Forest rustling in the winds, the acrid smell of burnt paint and fabric.

 _Easier said than done, Harry,_ she had thought.

In the present, the house elves sing, and the castle rumbles, and Harry is dead. Hermione looks at the ring and puts it on. “Harry James Potter,” she calls out to the wind, and the _Boy-Who-Is-Now-Dead_ materializes in front of her.

In the background, she hears her husband, Ron Weasley, comforting his sister, Ginny Potter, _née_ Weasley. Hermione knows that none of them approve of her use of the ring; she doesn't see another way out of it though. The Elder Wand is the most powerful wand in existence, and this attack on Hogwarts, a day after Harry was murdered, meant that its new master was looking for it. Not finding that somebody and neutralizing him or her would be just like leaving a nuclear bomb in the hands of your enemies. And you just didn't do that.

She looks at Dumbledore’s grave. Thankfully, it’s still intact with the Wand still inside. That gives them an advantage. It may be the only one they have.

* * *

In times of crisis, Ron works. He takes Ginny to the Burrow, leaves her in Mum’s care, and he floos to the Ministry, to the corner suite he and Harry shared, entering via the fireplace in the anteroom. Harry had the room to the left; his is the one to the right. Matching rooms, each with nice mahogany doors and golden nameplates. Ron pushes open the door of his own office and carefully steps over the book he left abandoned on the floor. His desk is a mess, with parchments everywhere, and the shelves that line the walls are filled with books and binders and decorated with the odd cup of cold tea. More cups are littered all over the place – on the plush armchairs for guests, on the sofa he sometimes kips on, on the desk, on the floor, and there are books, left open, on every flat surface, each corresponding to a Trace spell cast on a member of an extremist group: the neo-Death Eaters, the Open Air Society, the Separatists, and on and on. He hadn’t been able to sleep last night, knowing Hermione was somewhere in the Forbidden Forest, alone, and not being able to convince her to give up on her plan to find the Resurrection Stone via thirty-character messages sent through the Protean charms on their wedding rings. Instead, he worked on the case so he didn’t have to worry or grieve, writing up the crime scene report, putting together the draft psych profile of the perp, setting up the case binder, poring over the Tracebooks for any sign of _something_ out of the ordinary.

Each case gets a binder. The one for Harry is on the desk, spread open. Ron leans over his desk, checking his inbox for the toxicology report. Still not here. Dammit, he put a rush order on that bloody thing, how long will this bloody tox screen take anyway dammit most didn’t take a blasted day goddammit…

Ron sighs, forces himself to calm down. A wave of his wand vanishes the teacups; another adds bookmarks to all the open Tracebooks, and they fly to the bookshelves, automatically shelving themselves, squeezing together a little when they don’t quite fit. He reaches into a drawer and pulls out a vial so he can add the memory of his examination of Hogwarts to Harry’s binder. Then he taps his ring, sending _Where u?_ to Hermione.

The reply: _Mnstry → 12 G_

He checks his watch for the time – ten in the morning. The day’s barely started. He needs to assign the Hogwarts case to someone; he mentally goes through the list of Aurors he’d be willing to trust with something as important as this. They’ve always been somewhat casual about roles, but Aurors do tend to specialize in different types of cases. The skill set needed to hunt down dangerous killers is entirely different from the skill set used to root out financial crimes, after all. Parsons and Hewitt, maybe. They’re both Hogwarts alums, which will help. John Parsons’s a Ravenclaw, three years above Ron at Hogwarts, the type of meticulous investigator who’ll make sure to have a case nailed down completely, the type who wouldn’t give a judge any reason to strike his evidence. And Barry Hewitt’s a Slytherin, but he’s one of the best spell-residue-analyzers on the force. Ron sends his Patronus to fetch them. He floos Headmistress McGonagall to give her a heads-up, and he also asks her if she’d also like a couple of Aurors to beef up security at Hogwarts.

She calmly declines his offer. “Hogwarts can defend itself,” she says, and Ron wonders if this means she’s reactivated those giant stone statues.

“We got lucky, this time,” Ron says, “in that this intruder started with the East Wing.” Only parts of the castle are actually in use (it was designed for a much larger student population) and the East Wing was entirely unoccupied. “It could have been a lot worse.” He leaves the remainder of the thought unsaid: it'd be a political disaster if it was worse. He wouldn't be able to guarantee Hogwart's autonomy if it'd been worse.

“We got complacent,” McGonagall replies. “Your investigators are welcome to come, but Hogwarts won’t be caught off-guard again.” She lowers her voice. “Hogwarts does value her independence, you know, and while I trust you…” she trails off. "I'll deal with the Board."

And Ron does understand. He does remember Umbridge, after all, and while a couple of Aurors for security isn’t nearly the same thing as a puppet Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor, he also does know that Hogwarts is ancient magic, created and moulded by generations of witches and wizards, and this type of layered, generational magic could be more powerful than what he can provide. But his understanding isn't the House of Representative's understanding, and he'll have to get Hermione to convince them that this path is best. “I understand,” he says. “When will the castle be operational again?”

“We’re waiting to repair the Great Hall until your Aurors arrive, and we can sequester the East Wing indefinitely,” McGonagall replies.

Ron nods. “I’ll send them soon, then,” he says. He’s seen the magic of the school before; it can put the Great Hall back together in a few hours.

“And I’ll await them.” McGonagall closes the Floo connection, and Ron sits back to think. It was weird, once, speaking to Professor McGonagall as an equal and not as a student, giving orders to Aurors older than he was, but two years of being the Deputy Head has cured him of that. Assigning cases has fallen on him, mostly, forcing him to pull on scheduling and personnel management skills he never thought he’d have to develop.

Speaking of personnel management...maybe he should stick a protection detail on Ginny for a while. She wouldn’t appreciate it, definitely, and he’s well aware that he’s probably being an overprotective older brother, but he’d feel better if there was someone watching her back. He quickly dashes off a letter to her. He’d ask in person, but he suspects she’d hex him if he did. No, better to make this type of request from a distance. Then he goes back to the case binder, waiting for Parsons and Hewitt.

When the two Aurors arrive, Ron briefs them on the case and allows them to make copies of the relevant Tracebooks. He doesn’t, however, tell them about the Elder Wand.

And then Ron leaves his office. He has one task he must do.

He does, however, double back for Harry’s Invisibility Cloak, which he shoves into one of the pockets of his robe.

* * *

Hermione, like many children of the 1980s, grew up in fear.

She's heard that the Americans had nuclear drills, that they'd hide under their desks as if a half-inch of plywood would save them from a nuclear bomb. Well, it'd save them from an _Avada Kevada_ , at least, but it certainly wouldn't block a nuke.

(It's like Fred and George's protective hats that sold like hotcakes near the end of the war; why bother with shielding items when your enemy used _Avada Kevada_? Sure, they’d block most things, but not that.)

There's a day in first year she still remembers like the back of her hand. She'd been home on winter break; it had been Christmas, she'd been reading one of her schoolbooks ( _A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration_ – one of her favourites, even now) in front of the new television her parents were enjoying. And then, the words that lifted the fear that she grew up under –

“Breaking news: The USSR has dissolved. I repeat: The USSR has dissolved.”

The smile breaking out on her face when she realized the implications of that sentence. No more mutual assured destruction. No more fearing nuclear bombs. They won. A done deal, let's close the books, write this into history, we're free. She remembers outright celebrating; her parents breaking out the champagne. They let her have a bit, too, and it wasn't even New Years. She'd wondered how if this was how the wizarding world responded to Harry's initial defeat of Voldemort, in 1981; that immediate relief, tension breaking, muscles relaxing, nerves calming, the first hopeful flickers of _we're safe_. We're actually safe. No more hiding under desks, no more hiding behind useless shielding charms that don't block an _Avada Kevada_ anyway.

She still thinks of those three-and-a-half years as the best times of her childhood. She had friends, for the first time in her life. Two of them, in fact. Her entire future was spread out in front of her, with all of its glorious potential. She was a top student. She could do anything. She had the grades, the intellect. Everything.

And then...Voldemort. Right back to knowing that they were only one megalomaniac idiot from everything falling apart again. Right back to wondering if they'd make it to the next day.

At least this time, a hastily conjured half-inch thick sheet of plywood had some chance of saving her life.

It was also the first time in her life she'd ever faced prejudice, the first time she's ever entertained the idea that having good grades wasn't enough. Sure, she knew that she couldn't learn broomstick-riding from a book, but that was broomstick-riding. Not all that important, in the long run; she didn't need that for her career. (Not that she actually knew how careers – magical or Muggle – worked anyway, back then.) This was different. She was a Mudblood, and as far as a significant bit of the wizarding population was concerned, she was a second-class citizen, and even the best grades couldn't save her from that.

(She thinks of her attempts to free the house elves. Had she really been so naïve, to believe that just releasing them would solve everything?)

She fought Voldemort both out of necessity and out of loyalty. Unlike Ron, there was no way she could betray Harry; that'd be betraying herself and her future as well. She hadn't dared to hope for victory; she'd sent her parents away in case she died. But they had won. Somehow.

To this day, she wonders just how much reconstruction she missed, wonders how much it took to take the USSR from what it was to the Russia it is now. Because she's aided in a reconstruction process too, and, well, it wasn't simple. It took years to get to a reasonable amount of normalcy, and she'd be lying if she were to claim things were even on par, now, to what they were before Voldemort showed up. Dozens of irreplaceable magical artefacts gone, destroyed forever; Diagon Alley still marked with abandoned buildings; the wizarding population a mere two-thirds of what it was in 1970. Most everyone born before 1998 knew someone who died fighting for or against Voldemort.

She remembers standing on the rubble of Hogwarts after Voldemort's defeat, still tense, still nervous, wondering only what now? Because real life, unlike fiction, didn't end neatly and prettily once the Big Bad was defeated; there were still additional Death Eaters to mop up, Hogwarts to reconstruct, years and years of animosity between purebloods and Muggleborns to smooth over.

At least one of these three turned out to be easy. And the other two had...happened. Somehow.

But now, it seems like history was repeating itself once again, and maybe the third time was the charm.

* * *

Percy Weasley, who’s now Hermione’s Chief of Staff and General Counsel, is in her office when Hermione returns to the Ministry. Hermione’d inherited him, and many other Ministry officials, from former Minister Shacklebolt. It made sense. Both of them are of the Reform party, which counted most of the winning side of the Second Voldemort Insurrection among its members. The last election hadn’t been as decisive as any of Shacklebolt’s, but they’d come out with a majority in the House of Representatives still; for the next five years, unless she called a new election or got no-confidence’d, Reform would govern without needing a coalition.

Hermione walks into her office and nearly backs out again; she’s only been Minister for about two weeks, and she’s not used to this office yet. She’s walked into plenty of private meetings between Percy and Shacklebolt over the last few years to instinctively think she’s accidentally trespassed again. Percy’s sitting across from Vera, feet on Vera’s desk and a cup of tea at hand, chatting amicably with her.

It’s easy to forget that Vera’s artificial.

She’s an invention of George’s. Hermione suspects that he was trying to make some sort of sex robot, but what he ended up with instead was an actually pretty useful artificial intelligence. Vera handled her schedule, took messages, and even had a pretty decent book catalogue. Hermione sort of wishes that the automaton was somewhat…more dressed, and perhaps with less cleavage, but Vera’s been a boon to her productivity ever since George presented one to Hermione two years ago, so she’s learned to look past Vera’s lack of clothing. Practically every department head has one now, mostly to handle simple secretarial work.

Percy jumps up when he sees her. “Where were you?” he asks. “I nearly sent a search team out after you.”

“I’m sorry!” Hermione squeaks. She’s still hasn’t gotten used to the fact that she outranks him now.

“You have twenty-six messages,” Vera says, sounding somewhat peeved. She let out a small musical chirp. “Twenty-seven, now.”

Percy sighs. “When you were elected, I told you my job was to keep you out of trouble.” His eyes narrow. “That would be a lot easier if you didn’t run off. You’re the bloody Minister now; you can’t even afford the appearance of scandal.” He sits back. “Now, would you like to tell me what’s going on, and where were you last night?”

She holds out her hand. The Resurrection Stone catches the light, glints.

He looks down at it. “Are you serious!?”

She nods. “It’s the Elder Wand, Percy.” She keeps her shoulders back, spine straight. She doesn’t need to say the other half – it’s Harry. Twelve years later, they’re still the Golden Trio, just expanded to include Ginny. “But that’s not why I’m here. I need to make a speech, as soon as possible.” As the Minister of Magic, Hermione needs to reassure the population give them a reason to trust in the Ministry’s ability to deal with...everything that’s just happened. They’ve managed to keep Harry’s murder from hitting the press so far, but the Hogwarts attack was in broad daylight and couldn’t be covered up, and frankly, Harry’s death will be leaked to the blasted _Prophet_ sooner or later. Or sooner or later Rita fucking Skeeter’s going to start wondering why no one’s seen Harry lately and start asking around.

“Audrey’s already started drafting. Here –” Percy leans over, grabbing the relevant parchment and a self-inking quill off of Vera’s desk and handing it to Hermione, who taps the self-inking quill to change it to red. Of course Percy’s already anticipated this; he’s always been the only Weasley any good at politics.

Percy continues: “ – and Lee Jordan will be here in twenty.” After the war, Lee started the Magical Broadcasting Corporation, the MBC, which now broadcasts audio programming over most of Western Europe. It has syndicate partners in every English-speaking country. The speech better be perfect. Half the world will hear it. But Audrey Weasley, Percy’s wife, is a damned good speechwriter, so Hermione’s not worried.

“Yeah, okay.” Hermione hums, looking at the speech, sounding out bits of it in her head. It’s got a nice cadence, almost Churchill-like, building up line-by-line with repeated fragments. “Anything from our allies? Do you think we should treat this as a domestic issue?” Treating it as a domestic issue would mean Great Britain kept control; treating it as an armed attack would let her call upon Britain’s various allies: the Australians, the six nations of the North American Confederation, the Japanese…

“Definitely domestic,” Percy replies. “I’ve got missives from parts of the NAC already. Roanoke wants to know if we’re going to declare it an attack, which means they’re willing to give us combat units.”

Roanoke...where was Roanoke again? Roanoke was the Mississippi River basin and lands east of that to the Atlantic, Hermione remembers. “Which basically means they’ve offered to invade some unrelated part of the Ottoman Empire for us?” she sighs. “They blame everything on Islamists.” In general, the various members of the North American Confederation maintained closer ties to the Muggle world, although the Statue of Secrecy was still enforced. Of the three magical nations that the United States covered, Roanoke was the only one to embed its own citizens in the US military, which meant that the citizens of Roanoke tended to adopt the foreign policy positions of Americans, even if they didn’t make any damned sense in the magical world, given that the Ottoman Empire wasn't exactly the Middle East.

“That’s what I’m guessing, yeah. New Avalon, on the other hand, is willing to take in any Muggleborns – ”

“They’re assuming pureblood extremists?” It’s not a bad guess; pureblood extremists can be amazingly brazen, and a few times they'd even lynched Muggleborns in broad daylight. And New Avalon had the most flexible immigration policies and tended to be the most willing to temporarily alter them to adopt the oppressed of another nation. On the other hand, Hermione knows that Aurors keep a close eye on known pureblood extremists; it’s hard to imagine that they’d not have warning.

“Yeah. And Alta California’s sent the most generic ‘We’re with you’ that I’ve ever seen.”

Hermione sighs again. Alta California’s long harboured the Open Air Society, whose members in general thought the Statue of Secrecy was a terrible idea. Worse, instead of organizing themselves into a proper political fraction, they tended to make various ineffective attempts to prove to the Muggle world that wizards were real. Alta California’s generic response could mean that they empathize with the attackers. “I wouldn’t think the Airheads were interested in the Wand.”

“Ron says some of them are looking into wiping out magic for good.”

“Oh.” Alta California is like that, Hermione remembers; a suspiciously large number of their members supposedly-voluntarily bind their magic and live among Muggles. She can’t imagine ever doing that herself; she can’t imagine what kind of societal forces push them into that. “We’ll keep this a domestic issue,” she decides. When she first decided to run for Minister, she hadn’t realized just how annoying international politics could be, the various wizarding nations bickering like siblings forced to share a room, especially when a single Muggle nation covered the area of multiple magical nations, or the other way around. Heck, she’d barely realized that as far as the Wizarding world was concerned, the Ottoman Empire still existed, caliphate and all, and the United States wasn’t, well, united. Foreign policy hadn’t been her strong point. But she does know that she doesn’t want Roanoke’s military units running roughshod over Great Britain, and she knows full damn well that’s what they’d do if she allowed it.

She looks through the speech again, repeating it to herself, committing certain phrases to memory, learning its beats so she can deliver it well, until she’s interrupted by Vera announcing Lee Jordan. And then she goes out and delivers the speech. If the Office of Foreign Affairs has anything new, they know to find Percy.

Mentally, she moves “ _Find a replacement Foreign Minister_ ” higher up on the list of things she must do. But the problem is that she’s not sure who she trusts enough for that position, and that’s not something she can rush.

* * *

On her way back to her office, Hermione’s stopped by Eleanor Selwyn, a member of the Wizengamot. “Minister Weasley,” Selwyn began, “I would like to be informed about the recent – ”

Three thoughts went through Hermione’s mind. Firstly: while the Wizengamot has no official power anymore (they’d been effectively stripped of both their judicial and legislative duties at the end of the Second Voldemort Insurrection because a significant number of its members had supported Voldemort and because the Wizengamot was undemocratic as heck as its members were unelected) members of the Wizengamot, especially members with hereditary seats like the Selwyns, still possess significant cultural power. So while Eleanor Selwyn can’t block passage of any Reform bills, she can still give Hermione a hell of a bad press day.

Secondly: The Selwyns have had a hereditary seat in the Wizengamot since it was founded, somehow hanging on to power and wealth despite the shifting political landscape. As holders of a hereditary seat, they aren’t beholden to any political movement, although as long-term holders of a hereditary seat, they’ll avoid sticking their neck out, politically speaking.

Thirdly: Eleanor Selwyn, like most people from a family listed among the Sacred Twenty-Eight, tends to favour Motherland over Reform. But she also has a strong tendency to be deferential to the government, and unlike most of the hereditary seats, she’s perfectly willing to let “this harebrained experiment, allowing the rabble to govern” to continue. She rarely objected to any Reform measure, despite her own Motherland beliefs.

“ – attack at Hogwarts,” Selwyn’s saying. “I’m right about to march up there and take Christopher and Heather out!” Christopher and Heather being Selwyn’s nephew and grand-niece, respectively, if Hermione remembers correctly. “That school isn’t safe, and I have to find out from the _radio_?”

Internally, Hermione winces. Right. The Wizengamot expected special treatment. She should have gotten Vera to send a memo to each member of the Wizengamot; that new mail-merge feature Vera had made this type of thing easy.

She lets Selwyn continue her rant – something something things like this wouldn’t have happened in the past ( _yeah, right_ , Hermione thinks, _was Hogwarts_ ever _truly safe?_ ), something something new generation, something something moral degeneracy, something something rabble-rousers, something something. Hermione knows what she really needs to do is reassure Selwyn that Hogwarts is as safe as it’s ever been, and also reassure her that the Wizengamot was still special even in its current reduced state, so she waits until Selwyn’s mostly done with her rant before replying, “I apologize for not informing Wizengamot earlier. We have our best Aurors working on securing Hogwarts and investigating the break-in.” She places a hand on Selwyn’s shoulder in reassurance. “I believe Hogwarts is as safe as it’s ever been, but I can understand your worry.” There. That should do it. No part of that statement, taken out of context, sounded bad. She pulls out a small spiral and adds, “I’ll have the Aurors brief Wizengamot later today,” pretending to add it to her diary.

Selwyn opens her mouth, closes it, and then opens it again. “That would...that would be good, yes, Minister Weasley,” she says, turning to leave. She pauses, turning again to call over her shoulder. “Earlier better than later!”

Internally, Hermione sighs. She’d have to find someone to brief Wizengamot, now. Ron wouldn’t want to do it, and Harry _couldn’t_ , and she didn’t know who else important enough she could press into that role. Lost in her thoughts, she nearly walks into Pansy Parkinson. “Pardon me,” she says, while her mind immediately puts Parkinson in her political context.

Parkinson, unlike Selwyn, has actual political power as a member of the House of Representatives. She comes from the district of Devon, which is a four-MP district, and while the first MP is Reform, the second and third are both Motherland. Parkinson’s the second MP, which meant that she’s unlikely to be elected out any time soon. Additionally, the Parkinsons had a hereditary seat in the Wizengamot currently held by Parkinson’s father, Thaddeus Parkinson, a real piece of work who probably had been allied with Voldemort, but DMLE had never been able to prove anything. Thankfully, that also meant that he was next-to-unelectable, and he’d had to rely on pressuring his MP daughter.

But Pansy Parkinson, on the other hand, was surprisingly willing to work with Reform. More moderate than most of Motherland, she’d been more than willing to work with Minister Shacklebolt on the latest round of criminal justice reforms. Because of that, she’d been able to maintain a working relationship with the former Minister despite not being from the same party, and Hermione knows that’s it’s in her best interest to continue that. So she greets her with a smile and an outstretched hand. “Parkinson! Fancy seeing you today.”

“Oh, hi, Minister Weasley!” Parkinson squeaks, sounding far more terrified than any self-respecting MP should. “I...uh, have to, uh, go now,” she says, pushing past Hermione and nearly running down the corridor.

Hermione turns, watching her go, wondering _why is Pansy fucking Parkinson wearing brown shoes with black stockings?_ Then she shrugs, goes into her office, and sends Ron a memo, informing him that he had to find someone to brief the Wizengamot and the House of Representatives.

Finally, with some time to herself, Hermione makes a list of things she needs to research. 

 

>   1. Exactly what powers does the Elder Wand have.
>   2. What can masters of the Elder Wand do even if they don't have possession of the Wand? (ask Harry)
>   3. Given the wards on Harry and Ginny's house, what are the ways to bypass those wards without leaving traces? From what schools of thought do those ways come from?
> 


Then, she sits back and thinks a bit about Parkinson. Hermione knows she can't exactly ask Ron to look into the Parkinsons unless she had specific and overwhelming evidence that they were up to no good. Using the official investigative powers of the executive to look into her political opponents was considered taboo in a functioning democracy for a good reason, and she's not going to torpedo all the work she's done over the last twelve years for a fashion rule that she wasn't sure was followed anymore. (Hermione's never been good at fashion.) No, she'll keep her eyes out, but keep Ron out of it. Less documentation, this way, just in case there's nothing there.

Parkinson could just be having a bad day, after all. It could be unrelated. None of her business.

Hermione definitely doesn't want to be accused of using the full coercive power of the state improperly.

With that settled, Hermione makes a copy of her list. Walking over to Vera's desk, she says, "I need you to find me a list of all the books about these three topics."

Vera takes the paper and nods. "Acknowledged. I will find books on the Elder Wand. I will need a list of the wards on Harry and Ginny's house."

Cursing under her breath, Hermione takes back the paper, lists all the wards she can remember (although Harry and Ginny could have altered them; she's not sure her list is up-to-date), and hands it back to Vera. "Oh, and can you play me my messages as well?"

"Acknowledged," Vera says. "You have thirty-three new messages. The first is from..."

* * *

Ron arrives at the funeral home, alone. He’d rather be with Ginny and Hermione (or working the case), but someone needs to make arrangements, and he knows Ginny just can’t right now, so it’s fallen to him to make funeral arrangements for Harry. He had set up this meeting yesterday, and he’s keeping it because he doesn’t want the perpetrator to realize the Elder Wand’s at Hogwarts, and cancelling appointments now would just draw the perp’s attention there.

With the smaller-than-usual population of wizards and witches and the naturally long lives of magical folks, there’s only one funeral home in London, and it still has to take on some Muggles as well. The undertaker is a Squib by the name of Ashcroft, small and made smaller by age, with neat, almost elfin features and a smart suit, dark grey instead of harsh black. They’re sitting at a creme-coloured table at right angles from each other; the room is not sombre the way Ron thought a funeral home should be, but bright and airy instead, almost modern. Simple. No flowers. Soothing, almost.

There’s tea, of course, Earl Grey with milk and honey.

Harry’s left a few comments on what he’d like for a funeral – all Aurors have to fill out a form with that, the job’s hazardous – but he hadn’t accounted for the fact that the entire Wizarding world would want to go to his funeral. There’ll be a small, intimate thing for friends and family, of course, but there also needs to be a full state funeral.

Then again, none of them had thought Harry’d be dead just short of thirty. Like, yeah, being an Auror wasn’t a safe job, but being Head Auror was mostly a desk job. He’s spent more time these last two years dealing with personnel than out in the field. And before then…well, it’s been a quiet few years, after the Death Eaters were finally entirely captured. There have been murders, of course, but no more than what was ordinary, and most of those were just escalations of small disputes, not megalomaniacs seeking power. Hermione’s said that Magical Great Britain is more like a bunch of small towns than a large metropolis, whatever that was, and she hasn’t managed to explain it in a way that entirely made sense to him (seriously, why did Muggles agree to live stacked on top of each other, crowded into towers, crammed cheek-to-cheek in the thing called the “subway”. He’d asked about that, too, and the explanation he got he didn’t quite understand. Something about “Muggles don’t have transportation options that are nearly instantaneous.” Also something about Singapore being special.)

He’s deflecting. He knows he’s deflecting.

He knows he needs to focus.

He looks down at the floor plan. The church Ashcroft’s chosen is surprisingly easy to defend – Ron sees, easily, where he should place Aurors so they cover each other and the whole space – almost as if Ashcroft’s somehow known that’d be a concern and had considered it when he put together the funeral. Then again, it’s not that much of a stretch to guess that Harry Potter’s funeral will need security.

There’s another reason Ron wants to arrange the funeral so it happens sooner rather than later. There’s always some killers who can’t resist popping by the funeral. He’s planning on using the state funeral almost as bait, to see who’ll show up, so he mechanically goes through the details Ashcroft’s thrown together, from the flowers to the hymns. It’s not going to be Harry’s real funeral; he’s more than okay with using a state event like this as bait. He’s not expecting violence; the perpetrator hasn’t gotten his hands on the Elder Wand yet. He’s just expecting an appearance. Practically every profile expects the perp to show up, whether to gloat or to gather more information on the location of the Elder Wand.

“More tea?” Ashcroft asks, interrupting Ron’s thoughts. Ron nods absentmindedly. Gathering the mugs, Ashcroft rises and leaves the room, and Ron goes back to the funeral plans. He looks up from the provisional schedule, sometime later, to see a familiar face watching him through the window, and before he thinks, he has wand out and he’s casting the Trace on her.

* * *

Of course Ron goes to Percy. This is precisely what Percy’s job was: to figure out why whatever questionably-legal thing you just did was actually legal all along. So Ron’s first instincts are to round up as much supporting documentation as he had, and although that he knows it's far from sufficient, he takes it to Percy. There’s not much: her resume (complete with family tree) and her file. He sent in a request for her immigration papers, but that’ll take a while.

Percy pages through the documentation slowly with a frown on his face. “Talk me through the evidence you have.”

Ron nods. “Preliminary examination of Harry and Ginny’s wards have yet to show any sign of traces or of tampering. And Bulstrode still hasn’t gotten me a tox screen back, which means whatever potion she used, it’s not common.” It’s what’s been bugging him for the last two hours. Usually, toxicology screens did not take twenty-four hours. Forensics typically would test for different potions sequentially, depending on how long the test took and how common the potion was, and in most cases the potion was found within the first twenty-four hours.

“Wait a minute.” Percy raises his hand to stop Ron. “How are you so sure that Harry was poisoned?”

Ron takes two slow breaths in an attempt to keep his voice unemotional. “Forensics couldn’t find any trace of a curse. And the...the way he died.” He took another breath. “Wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before.” Harry had thrown up, seized, soiled himself, and then died before Ginny could react. According to Bulstrode, it was like he’d been suffocated, but without the usual raspy gasps of that type of potion.

“Hell of a way to die.” Percy nods slightly, indicating that he didn’t need any more details.

Acknowledging Percy with a small nod of his own, Ron continues, “I considered ‘overkill’, but can’t be sure that the perp knew what the potion she used did.” Or, perhaps, she knew exactly what it did, and picked that particular potion for other reasons.

Percy makes a small _hum_ and scribbles something down. Ron looks down on his hand and thinks. Overkill refers to trauma beyond what was necessary for murder, and whatever the perp used seemed unnecessarily cruel to Ron. It could hint at some sort of hatred or anger towards Harry...towards the victim, but on the other hand, the perp only dosed Harry once, and it _i_ _s_ possible that she didn’t intend –

“She?” Percy interrupts Ron’s thoughts. “Why a female perp?” He has an eyebrow raised.

Ron shook his head. “We usually expect a woman behind a poisoning but I know that’s not absolute; this isn’t based on that. Anyway – ” he waves his hand to shove all they’ve discussed aside for a minute “ – we can’t find a curse, we can’t find any residues in his wards, and we can’t figure out the potion. That means either the perp is a genius or an Auror.”

Percy’s writing again. “Go on.”

“Either the perp has managed to find a novel way to slip past all of Harry and Ginny’s wards _and_ find a potion that didn’t show up on any of the common tests, or the perp knows how Aurors work and knows what we look for.”

Percy nods. “And why Auror Menendez, specifically?”

Ron closes his eyes to gather his thoughts. “Well, first, she typically handles the potions trafficking cases, which gives her a good idea of how Forensics works.” And before she’d come to Great Britain, she’d worked Vice in Alta California. She’d have a better idea of what potions were the most difficult to identify than almost anyone else. Additionally, investigating potions trafficking gave Menendez an excellent opportunity to divert rare and controlled ingredients to her own supply.

“And?”

How to explain? “If we assume – I know, I know, can’t assume – but if we assume the perp was after the Elder Wand, then – ” he breaks off to take another long, slow breath. “The perp is organized.” To be able to bypass all of the wards without leaving any trace took considerable attention to detail. And Menendez is like Parsons. Neither of them would let an uncrossed _t_ or an undotted _i_ embarrass them on the witness stand.

Ron recalls Menendez staring at him at the funeral home from across the street. “The perp made an attempt to locate the Elder Wand today but didn’t find it. She’ll put a priority on finding it.” After all, if anyone disarms her – well, he really should have done _that_ when he saw her. Oh well. He has the Trace; he can track her down. He makes a mental note to ask Hermione to ask Harry if the Elder Wand could be intentionally surrendered by one person to another.

“And you think she’ll try to tail or Trace us to find the Wand?” Percy guesses.

Ron nods. “And what better place to do it than the funeral?” He’d been planning on using the state funeral as bait; he hadn’t expected to catch someone so early.

“So, why stalk the funeral home?” Percy asks.

“She’s a planner. She’ll want to know exactly how the funeral will proceed.” He pauses a bit before pulling out another thread. “If we assume that the perp’s after the Elder Wand, then…” How to word _this_ thread? “It’s not uncommon, for those who want power, to want both large-scale and small-scale power. Some try to be politicians; a terrifyingly large number try to become Aurors. Most are too screwed up to become either.” The number of muggle serial killers who’d made friends with muggle police was actually quite terrifying. “But this crime, this crime must have been meticulously planned out.” He pauses again to pick out his words carefully. “We screen for that, you know. Screen for people who want to become Aurors for the wrong reasons. But screening’s never perfect.” He closes his eyes, remembers the way she looked, cold and watchful. “She has the personality I’d expect. She took the bait.”

“And motive?”

That’s indeed a hole in his theory. “Other than just the Elder Wand?”

“No. What would she want to do with the Elder Wand, precisely?”

Ron doesn’t know the answer to that question. “Motive isn’t always important, though, especially this early. I suspect, if I continue to investigate, I'll find it.” After all, the detailed motives of criminals were often quite personal and difficult to reveal without studying the suspect. The general motive of power would suffice for now.

Percy sighs. “Anything else?” he asks, flipping through the documentation to bring Menendez’s family tree to the top.

Ron shakes his head. “Not really, no.” He knows all he has is a hunch, but his hunches are usually pretty good.

“Unfortunately, profiles aren’t probable cause. You’re not going to be able to get a warrant with what you have.” Percy sighs again. “And Menendez is married to CLL. You’re going to need a damned good case.” He shoves the family tree towards Ron as if Ron actually needed to see it.

Ron scowls at that. The Civil Liberties League was a goddamn thorn in the side of the Auror Department. Consisting of mostly people who for some reason were willing to defend even the scum of the earth, the CLL was probably responsible for at least a third of the rules in the _Auror’s Handbook of Proper Procedure,_ and they were currently helping Lucius fucking Malfoy appeal his conviction to the Supreme Court, for Merlin’s sake. He's fully aware that any fudging in a search warrant against the CLL or family of CLL is going to be thrown right back at him in court, and he has never been able to understand why Hermione continues to donate to and support the CLL.

Percy continues to hold the family tree out towards Ron, and Ron takes it. “You have seventy-two hours to prepare a warrant or nothing you get from that Trace will be admissible in court,” Percy says. Legally, Ron could still get a _post hoc_ warrant for that Trace. He had up to seventy-two hours after he cast the Trace to do so.

Ron looks down at the family tree. Because both Menendez and her wife are Muggleborns, the family tree is short and simple. Just _Valerie Menendez_ connected to _Jessica Compton_ with a solid line, and their parents. Neither have siblings. “I...don't care if it’ll be admissible in court,” he admits. “I’ll have my evidence either way.”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Percy says evenly. “Still…how sure are you? I’m not convinced, to be honest, and I’d think you’d suspect a group for something like this.”

“Could be a group,” Ron admits. He closes his eyes and thinks. A group did make more sense, if only because the knowledge needed to pull off a murder like this is enormous. But still…“I wouldn’t be surprised if a perp this organized acts alone; if she has accomplices they’ll be people she utterly trusts.” That, for Menendez, would probably be either her wife or Alta Californians. She hasn’t even been in Great Britain two years; it’s not likely for her to find accomplices she’d trust that much in the time. So he’ll need to speak to Compton, and maybe take a look through the International Floo Department’s logs. “We’ll start with her, see who else we can scare up.”

Percy flips through more documentation, trying to poke more holes in Ron’s logic. A necessary step: if he doesn’t do it, the judge Ron presents the warrant to will. “According to Ginny, the perp’s short and wore elegant gloves and an opera mask.” He pulls out Menendez’s resume from the stack of parchments, looking to the upper right corner for her biological details. “Menendez is pretty tall.”

“Altering ones height isn’t that implausible.”

“It’d throw off her gait, though.”

“Maybe she practiced.” Ron can imagine Menendez practising. “It’s a good way to throw us off. Most perps don’t alter their height.” And it’s precisely something an Auror-turned-criminal would do.

Percy nods. “Well then. I’ll take a look, see what I can do for you.” He looks down at the stack of parchment. “Doesn’t look too promising, though. You know full damned well that profiles aren't enough for probable cause.”

“I’ll bring you more,” Ron promises.

* * *

By the time Ron makes it back to his office to set up a Tracebook for Menendez, she’s already left the funeral home. In fact, she appeared to be home, probably asleep. It made sense – she worked the third shift, from midnight to eight in the morning.

The modern Trace was considerably more powerful than the previous Trace. The previous Trace, cast on wands, allowed one to know when that wand was used, what spell was cast, and where that spell was cast. The new Trace, cast on a person, gave their location, everything they said, and everything they wrote. While it was entirely possible for someone to throw off the Trace, that just meant that they knew they had something to hide, and many a prosecutor had used that to prove intent of criminality.

Ron sends out a memo to the International Floo Department, asking for a list of people who’ve entered Great Britain via Floo in the last six months who were either a resident of or a citizen of a NAC country. It’ll be a long list, but he hopes he can narrow it down by looking at the people Menendez talks to. (It’s not a great strategy. Well-organized criminals often go silent after the crime to prevent Traces from connecting them, and the Trace, as powerful as it is, isn’t retroactive.)

He uses the International Floo’s Long-Distance Letter system to send a request to Menendez’s previous boss, one David Schwartz. Ron plays this request lightly, making it seem like nothing more than a simple reference-check. He didn’t want Menendez to know that she was under investigation.

Then he checks his own inbox and curses mildly under his breath at the memo from Hermione. Man, he really hated briefing the fucking Wizengamot. That’d always been Harry’s duty. He pauses a bit, the grief that he’d managed to keep buried with work flaring up again, but he forces those feelings back into their box and reaches for the next memo in his inbox.

It’s from Hewitt. As expected, he’s found many spell residues corresponding to many different magical signatures on Hogwarts’ wards, which is pretty typical for a semipublic place. Unfortunately, narrowing down those magical signatures to find out just who’s who isn’t trivial. Firstly, spell residues are quite affected by the wand used, to the point where identifying the wand is much more reliable than identifying the wizard. Criminals who knew this often would buy a second wand on the black market or steal a wand, and defence barristers would often argue that _their_ client wasn’t the actual person behind the wand. Thankfully, the Ministry had a database of each wand sold (minus, of course, the black market, hand-me-downs, and secondhand wands), so a residue properly isolated could usually point to only a small number of wands, and Aurors knew who (had once, at least) owned those wands.

Unfortunately, there’s another way around the database – wandless magic. Wandless magic leaves residues that correspond directly to the witch or wizard, and Ministry _doesn’t_ have a database of magical signatures for witches and wizards, and the law requiring all felons to submit their magical signatures to the database was only four years old. So while wandless magic residues could help convict a perp, it was less helpful in finding him.

Hogwarts, of course, being filled with students, was filled with residues, both of the with-wand type and the wandless type. And Hewitt’ll have to dig through this haystack, looking for the needle that’s the magical signature of the perp. And that’s hoping there are residues at all. After all, the perp has managed to not leave them in Harry’s and Ginny’s wards. Somehow.

Ron thinks a bit, and then pens a memo to Parsons, delegating the task of briefing the Wizengamot to him. He thinks about explicitly asking him to remind the Wizengamot that remaining calm was paramount, but decides to leave that out. And then he heads to 12 Grimmauld Place.

* * *

For Hermione and many other former members of the Order of the Phoenix, 12 Grimmauld Place would always be Headquarters; they gather here again after twelve long years. They are not the young adults of old; they are well-respected witches and wizards, many with high positions in the Ministry with duties they needed to handle, married, almost thirty, considering kids. Ron is Deputy Head Auror. Luna is, inexplicably, an Unspeakable. Neville is a professor at Hogwarts. Ginny plays for the Holyhead Harpies.

But it feels like it was twelve years ago, all of them gathered over the kitchen table, facing a new threat.

Ginny has the head of the table, as 12 Grimmauld Place is hers now. She looks quite the worse for wear with her hair obviously unwashed and deep shadows under her eyes. The last forty-eight hours haven't been kind to her. Just last week, she and Harry had announced their first child; yesterday morning she'd been woken up by her husband having what appeared to be a seizure. He’d died before she could even Floo St. Mungo’s.

And next to Ginny is the ghostly apparition of her husband. Harry's already tried to touch Ginny, but he can't. His hands just simply pass through her, and she doesn't feel it. Ginny can't see the pained look on his face, either. She can't see him at all. Only Hermione can see Harry because she's the only one willing to wear the ring. They all know the dangers of the ring, they've all seen what happened to Dumbledore's hand. Ginny especially refuses to wear it.

“I'm not sure I'd be able to take it off,” she had said.

To be fair, Hermione doesn't know if she should be wearing the ring either, but with the Elder Wand out there, somewhere, she feels like she doesn't have a choice. It's not a nuclear bomb, but it sure feels like one though, and this time, they don't have their own nuke in reserves. There's no mutual assured destruction here.

Ginny calls the meeting to order, her voice quiet but authoritative. Neville steps up to answer the question that all of them are asking – what happened? He commands the room the way he controls his classroom, but after the long day, half of them are fading in and out of attention, barely taking in his words.

“We were all in the Great Hall for breakfast,” he begins. “When all the windows exploded…”

There had been an intruder who had managed to slip through Hogwarts' many wards like a hot knife through butter. Starting with the East Wing, he’d methodologically demolished as much of the castle as he could. It appears that he’d accidentally blasted his way into the Great Hall, took one look at the gathered professors, and fled.

Neville's describing the intruder: “Whoever it was was invisible – all I saw was a cloaked figure and a floating wand.”

“There was no one under that cloak,” Headmaster McGonagall adds. “No one I could detect.”

Hermione imagines that Moody, somewhere in heaven, saying “Constant vigilance!” to that. Then again, Elder Wand. Perhaps just mastery of it was enough to allow someone to become actually invisible, like Harry's cloak. She doesn't know. (Maybe the Hogwarts library does? Or 12 Grimmauld's library. She should ask Vera about it.)

“That’s interesting,” Ron says. “The perp who murdered Harry wasn’t invisible.” Oh, right, yes. Ginny had mentioned a glove and a mask.

“How tall was the cloaked figure?” Hermione asks.

“Not all that tall. Five feet, at most,” Neville replies.

There aren't that many wizards five feet or shorter. Might have been a place to start, except, oh wait, Hermione, are you the former head of DMLE or not? Polyjuice, duh. She considers what evidence they actually have, and comes up with “approximately nothing.” Sometimes, magic's ability to do just about anything got annoying, especially if you're in law enforcement.

“That matches the person I saw...” Ginny trails off. Hermione can guess what Ginny couldn't say. _That matches the person I saw murder Harry_.

Next to Ginny, Harry hovers silently, twirling his wand nervously. On Ginny's other side, Ron sighs. “We have to get the Elder Wand back, yes, but it's been a long day. Let's get some rest.”

Hermione inhales, exhales, bracing herself. “Forgive me for asking,” she begins, “but what does that wand do? I mean...precisely. Precisely what does it do?”

“Like many things in the magical world, it's been lost to the mists of history,” McGonagall replies. “It does many things in legend. Whether that's reality or just myth, we don't know.” Makes sense. Thirteen years ago, the vast majority of the wizarding world believed that the Hallows themselves were nothing but a legend, and for obvious reasons, most of the previous owners of the Hallows were reluctant to write about them. The part of Hermione that belongs to the DMLE is less than happy with the lack of useful evidence.

Ron's going around, assigning rooms, being the host to spare his sister that duty. Chairs being pushed in, the roar of the Floo, the creak of the front door opening, soft treads on the stairwell; people are retiring. 12 Grimmauld’s feels like a safe house of sorts; it certainly has better wards that her and Ron’s house. Hermione sighs. One megalomaniac wizard per lifetime was enough for anyone, but fate's not exactly fair, and she has no idea how much time they have this time around, no clue what the mystery assailant wanted, no idea on how to get out of this situation.

And she doesn't like being clueless, so she finds her way up to 12 Grimmauld Place's library with Harry at her side. She calls for Vera and asks for a list of books on the Deathly Hallows, and between 12 Grimmauld’s library and the Ministry library, Vera can get Hermione most of them. Hermione starts off scanning through books herself; after an hour she's merely flipping the pages for Harry (for the dead do not need to sleep); thirty minutes after that Ron's dragging her up to bed, reminding her that she too needed to rest.

She falls asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The MBC isn’t a radio broadcast because they’d run the risk of being detected by Muggles (tl;dr every wavelength that’s not blocked by air is accounted for and used by something), so instead it’s a radio-inspired magical broadcast.
> 
> I’ve made a few, very minor, changes to canon in order to have a more consistent worldbuilding. Things like renaming the “Second Wizarding War” to the “Second Voldemort Insurrection”, etc. “Second Wizarding War” would be the equivalent of calling the War of 1812 the “Second Human War” – the Second Voldemort Insurrection is unlikely to be the only the second war with wizards on both sides, it’s not a global war (it certainly didn’t seem to leave Europe), and for various reasons, I didn’t want the Second Voldemort Insurrection to be formally A War. Functionally? That’s a different matter.
> 
> Also, they get a single-transferable-vote 100-member Parliament! I figured that a new, young democracy could try out some new ideas :P [Here’s a CGP Grey video on single-transferable-vote.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI)
> 
> Also, a lot of books went into this! I’ll mention them when they become relevant/non-spoilery, but for the profiling bits I mostly relied on _Mindhunter_ by John Douglas. And I did intentionally replace some jargon with more common terms (ie, ‘perp/perpetrator’ for ‘unsub’, etc) for the sake of clarity.


	2. Warrantless Trace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I listen to a lot of music, and I usually use music to help me find the right tone for writing. The song I used for this chapter is Halestorm’s [“Private Parts”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUx1XSQTN1E), which is actually quite deep, despite its juvenile title. And it's apparently what I think of when I'm searching for a song that says "unlawful search."
> 
> Quotes are topical and definitely not endorsements. Because no one likes torture memo guy.

* * *

“ _The ultimate test of whether the government may engage in foreign surveillance is whether the government’s conduct is consistent with the Fourth Amendment, not whether it meets FISA. This is especially the case where, as here, the executive branch possesses the inherent constitutional power to conduct warrantless searches for national security purposes. Well before FISA’s enactment, Presidents have consistently asserted – and exercised – their constitutional authority to conduct warrantless searches necessary to protect the national security.”_

~[John Yoo](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2723976-John-Yoo-to-FISC-2002-Stellarwind.html) on Stellar Wind.~

* * *

_Thursday, 11 March 2010_

Morning comes. It always does.

Making tea. Always done first, even before Hermione bothers to get dressed or do her hair or anything. Somewhere, she knows she looks absurd, with her bunny slippers and pink dressing gown and unruly hair, but come on. Tea comes first.

Then the hair. After the battle of Hogwarts, she started wearing it in a tight French braid, kept in place with many a charm. Ron's always teased her about it. “When you put your hair up like that,” he says, “it looks like you'd never take it down again. Reminds me of McGonagall's bun.”

She'd laughed at that; she's always been the most proper, the most straitlaced of the Trio.

Hermione reminisces as she drinks her tea (it's early in the morning, and no one else is awake yet). After she'd gone to Australia and restored her parents' memories, she went back to Hogwarts, finished her seventh year with Ginny and Luna, took her N.E.W.T.S. with them as well. Harry and Ron had proceeded straight to being Aurors, skipping even Auror training with their reputations as war heroes. But she'd insisted on doing everything in the right order, doing things the proper and above-ground way, so no one could accuse her of using Harry's victory to advance her own career.

Even now, quite a few people accuse Shacklebolt of favouritism, since he appointed her as one of the youngest heads of the DMLE ever.

She's always felt that she'd earned that position fair and square. With Harry and Ron gone so often on Auror missions, mopping up the remainder of Voldemort's Death Eaters, dismantling Azkaban (no one trusted the Dementors anymore, after they'd joined Voldemort), chasing down all the petty criminals that had popped up while most everybody was either fighting for or against Voldemort, Hermione had little to do but throw herself into her work.

Especially since her parents had opted to stay in Australia. They still haven't forgiven her for the memory charm. “You charmed us to just forget about you?” they still tell Hermione, in her dreams. “How could you do that? We're your parents. How could you just change our memories like that, without asking us?”

And no matter how much she protested (“It was for your safety! Voldemort...”) she couldn't make them forgive her, in reality or in dreamland.

_Oh well. At least this time I don't have to memory-charm them to get them to move to Australia this time._

It takes her this long to notice that she's not wearing the ring; maybe Ron had removed it last night? She goes upstairs to retrieve it, her footsteps still very quiet on the stairs, even though it's been twelve years since she's last had to sneak around.

It's Thursday. She should be at work.

Instead, she's trying to save the world again.

Ron, to Hermione's surprise, isn't asleep in their bed. _Huh._ _How did I not notice last night?_ Then again, she'd been incredibly tired; she'd probably wouldn't have noticed a hippogriff barging into her room, much less something as routine as sleeping in a bed alone (as Ron got called away from her at night fairly frequently for Auror business).

(And the campaign. The six weeks of the campaign, when they hadn’t shared a bed at all because of how hectic Hermione’s schedule got with work during the day and campaigning during the evenings. They hadn’t talked for almost six whole weeks except for the time she’d accused him of cheating with her with a woman who turned out to have been an undercover Auror trying to pass on a memory. She’d felt so embarrassed when Harry had set her straight. And guilty. Guilty for not trusting her husband when he’d tried to explain even when she knew, she bloody knew the damned _Prophet_ was always trying to break them up.)

She smiles when she sees Ron's note on her nightstand; in his messy scrawl are the words “Ginny's having a nightmare, gone to comfort her.” Ron's always been a bit protective of his younger sister, but after the war, after Fred's death, well, he'd do anything for her.

The ring is on her nightstand too, black gem doing its best to blend in with the ebony furniture that still dominated in 12 Grimmauld Place, and Hermione puts it on. “Morning, Harry.”

He materializes next to her. “Morning. How's life?” he says with obviously forced levity.

“How's death?” Hermione deadpans back.

Harry laughs, and Hermione jumps a bit at that. She finds herself smiling too. It's absurd, incredibly absurd, and really that joke wasn't funny at all, except she's on-edge and still tired and there's only so much you can take before you either laugh or go crazy. That's how to survive things like this; grab every chance to laugh, throw a wedding for Bill and Fleur during the height of Voldemort's return, remind yourself of every bit of happiness and hope because that's the only thing keeping you from screaming at fate. Laugh, because the other option is succumbing to hopelessness.

“Good one, there,” Harry says after he's calmed down. “Have you had your tea this morning?”

“Why do you ask?” she replies defensively.

“That joke was so horrible I couldn't be sure.” He pauses and then continues with forced evenness. “How's Ginny?”

“Ron's with her.” Her tone of voice says the rest. Hermione looks down, fidgets with her hands. She's usually good at social interaction nowadays – well, she's better than Ron at least – but this isn't something she's prepared for. How do you talk to your dead friend about his still-living wife, anyway?

“I see.” Harry sighs. “I wish I could...” he trails off. He sighs again, composing himself. When he speaks again, his tone is very even. “I met him, you know. Cadmus Peverell. He made the Resurrection Stone.”

Hermione looks up. “I thought Death made it – ”

“That's just legend; Dumbledore was right. The Hallows were made by the Peverell brothers.”

Hermione lets out a sigh of relief. “Does this mean the Elder Wand isn't all-powerful?” She's spent enough time chasing after the truth in legends when she was eighteen; she's not looking forward to doing it again.

“I don't know. The Resurrection Stone appears to be strong enough to bring me back, at least partially.” Harry looks down at his incorporeal hands, hands that will never give the simple comfort of human touch again. “It's strange being dead, and yet not dead,” he says, closing his eyes. Then, with an intentionally cool, intellectual tone, as if he was reciting from a textbook: “The Resurrection Stone appears to be the only connection between this life and the next; most of the dead have no idea what happened on earth after they've died. Cadmus didn't even know how his daughter fared until she died as well.”

 _Did you see your parents?_ Hermione wants to ask; she has enough tact to realize that it'd be an incredibly awkward question, though. Instead: “What did you find out last night?”

“Well, more about Cadmus' family tree than I’d care to know, but nothing useful. Nothing useful from the book I was reading last night, either.” Harry shrugs. “Maybe we're coming at this from the completely the wrong direction.” He absentmindedly runs his fingers along his wand holster the way a soldier touches his gun for reassurance, and he continues, “Who would want the Elder Wand?”

_Who wouldn't?_

That was the fundamental problem. A lot of people would kill for the power the Elder Wand could bring.

The creaking of the stairs startles Hermione out of her thoughts. Ron rubs at his eyes as he descends the stairs. “Mornin’. Is that tea?”

Hermione passes him a cup. “Morning. How’s Ginny doing?”

“She’s holding up better than I thought she would,” Ron replies. Beside him, Harry opens his mouth, thinks better of it, and closes his mouth again. (Hermione suspects that he finds this situation, where she’s his middleman for every conversation, as awkward as she does.)

Personally, Hermione’s always given Ginny more credit than Ron ever did. He’s always been quite protective of her. “That’s good, I guess?”

He shrugs. “She really doesn’t like the idea of a protective detail.”

Hermione nods. She can understand; she’s always refused a protective detail herself. She’s never liked the idea of someone following her around everywhere, and Ginny’ll want privacy to grieve. But she knows that Ron wouldn’t appreciate her two cents, so she changes the subject. “We’re going to have to tell the public about Harry’s…eventually.”

Ron closes his eyes and nods. “Okay.”

Harry says, “You haven’t….?”

 _No, we haven’t_ , Hermione mouths at him, so Ron doesn’t hear. (This dual-conversation thing isn’t easy.)

Harry’s eyes widen. (He’s never been a fan of politics.) “Why?”

Hermione turns to him. “Harry, the fact that you’re the Master of the Elder Wand is the worst kept secret of the war.”

Ron blinks, confused for a second. “I forgot that….” he gestures at the Resurrection Ring. He makes a gallant attempt at turning to face Harry as well, but he’s off by a few feet. “People will panic. They’ll think that there’s a new Lord Voldemort. We were hoping to have a suspect fast enough that...”

Harry nods. “But?” he prompts.

“We’ve got nothing for physical evidence,” Hermione says. “Nothing on your wards, no spell traces on your body, tox screen hasn’t returned. Nothing. All we have is Ginny’s description of the perp. No idea of the means. No idea of the motive.”

“Merlin,” Harry says. “Nothing? Through a _Fidelius?”_

Hermione nods. “Yeah, nothing on the _Fidelius_.”

“Nothing on the _Fidelius_ ,” Ron repeats, sounding almost absent-minded. “It’s not an easy ward to break or sidestep.” He closes his eyes to think. “How degraded is it?”

For complex reasons, the _Fidelius_ Charm had a pretty annoying weakness: if the Secret Keeper spent too much time under it, the Charm would very slowly degrade. A short visit every now and then was fine, but this clause of the Charm was why James Potter hadn’t been able to be his own Secret Keeper. So when Hermione and Ron’d gotten married and purchased their own home, they’d swapped Secret Keeping with Harry and Ginny. Harry was Hermione’s Secret Keeper, and she was his.

She’d thought it was clever at the time.

She’d thought it was less clever when the magical loo in her new house had suddenly started vomiting up dirty water, and she couldn’t get a hold of Harry, and she couldn’t call a plumber until she could get a hold of Harry. Luckily, the Charm allowed the secret to be transmitted via parchment, so after she’d finally managed to get the toilet repaired and the mess cleaned up, she wrote Harry’s address down a few dozen times, and he’d done the same for her. She kept the copies of her address in a well-warded drawer, occasionally pulling one out to show to grant access to her home. But suddenly she realizes just how many people she’d given her address out to over the years – the grocery-delivery service, the plumbers, the handymen, the Ministry Floo inspectors...and probably the same for Harry.

Ron’s probably wondering if their visits to each other’s homes had degraded the _Fidelius_ enough for a perp to break through. But that...that might not have been necessary. All a perp needs to do if he or she wants in was to moonlight as an emergency plumber or handyman for long enough. And who knows if the grocers properly checked the backgrounds of everyone they hired to do deliveries.

“I...I’ll check that out today,” Hermione finally replies to Ron.

“Don’t you have Minister stuff to do?” Ron asks.

She levels a glare at him.

“Okay, okay,” he backs off. He pauses a bit before saying, “If we can manage two or three more days before we have to disclose Harry’s death – sorry, mate – I might be able to have enough evidence to finger a suspect.”

Hermione suspects this means he’s found at least one person who matches the profile, but she couldn’t even begin to fathom how he’d gotten enough information to put together a profile. “Two or three days might be doable,” she says. “And...I think we should bring it to _Circumspect_ before it breaks.”

(After the Insurrection, she’d made sure to help encourage the growth of multiple different news outlets. In addition to the _Daily Prophet_ and the _Quibbler_ , there’s now the _Times_ , the _Post_ , and _Circumspect_. The _Times_ leaned Motherland, the _Post_ leaned Reform, and _Circumspect_ could be counted on to accurately report every rumour that went through the Ministry.)

“ _Circumspect_?” Ron asks. “Why them? Why not a more favourable newspaper?”

“They’re at least mostly viewed as neutral,” she replies. “I don’t want to be seen as playing favourites for a news story this big. The press will be right pissed we’re keeping this from them; we shouldn’t give them more reason to be annoyed.”

Ron nods. (He hasn’t ever been a fan of politics either.) “Okay. I trust your judgment.” He looks up at the clock, and then he stands up and heads towards the Floo. “I should go in.”

Once Ron’s gone, Harry says, “The two of you will need to find a new Secret-Keeper.”

“Yeah.” But in truth, Hermione hasn’t really stopped to consider that. She realizes now that they should have recast the _Fidelius_ every now and then in order to remove access for people who no longer needed it, but it’s now too late for Harry to take that precaution. “I’ll talk to Ron about that.” Neville might be a good choice, she thinks. But that’s part of the point of 12 Grimmauld, wasn’t it? A place where none of them visited, so the _Fidelius_ on it (renewed after the end of the Insurrection) would not decay.

“And...and can you take me to Ginny?” Harry asks, scratching awkwardly at his right ear.

Hermione nods and heads upstairs. She stands outside Ginny’s room, close enough to let Harry phase through the door in a ghost-like way. Half an hour later, he comes back out, nods slightly, and they walk outside to Apparate to Harry and Ginny’s house.

* * *

Harry and Ginny had elected to buy a different house, away from London, away from Hogwarts, away from most of the wizarding world. Hermione's visited before; she's always been struck by how domestic and suburban the place was, a cookie cutter house with three bedrooms, two and a half baths, and a fucking white picket fence, very Muggle. It's Thursday morning, and up and down the street people are getting into their cars to go to work and school, husbands with newspapers and briefcases, modern wives with neat skirts and low heels, schoolchildren with multicolour backpacks and lunch pails, none of them suspecting that wizards and witches still lived among them.

If it weren't for the Elder Wand, Hermione wouldn't have insisted on investigating herself. She really shouldn't be involved; the law really does prefer its investigators to be impartial for a reason, and there’d been a team of Aurors through yesterday. But nothing compares to seeing things with your own eyes, feeling things with your own magic, so Hermione approaches now anyway, trailing a step behind a very determined Ginny. To her right is Bill Weasley. To her left is the ghostly form of Harry. Behind them, the occasional car drives by.

The wards here are familiar; Hermione and Bill helped set them up, eleven years ago, but Harry and Ginny have been maintaining them ever since. Methodically, they check the wards, looking for any changes, any evidence of tampering, circling the building slowly, Bill and Ginny to the left, Hermione and Harry to the right. They meet up again in the well-manicured backyard.

“Anything?” Hermione asks.

Bill shakes his head. “Nothing I can put my finger on. The wards are all there; none of them seem to have been breached. And the _Fidelius_ is fine.” There are two ways of getting past wards: you either went around them or straight through them. The first was less likely to leave traces but typically required detailed knowledge of what wards were there; the second almost always left traces of magic behind. Going around took time. Going through took magical strength.

Hermione sighs. “Can you think of anyone who'd want Harry dead?” she asked Ginny.

“We both know plenty of people want him dead, Hermione,” Ginny replies, shoulders are squared and voice steady; Hermione's reminded of the Ginny that helped lead Dumbledore's Army during Voldemort's return. “He's put a lot of people in Azkaban. And there's still plenty of blood-purity extremists out there,” Ginny continues. “Neo-Death Eaters, for one, but Motherland’s also pretty popular among the blood-purity extremists.”

Beside Hermione, Harry grins wistfully. “Always knew I married a strong woman.” He sighs. “Take care of her, will you, Hermione? And – ” he sighs again “ – and, when this is over, and give her some time, please tell her that I would like it if she finds someone else someday? Not that she needs my permission or – ”

“I know,” Hermione cuts him off. She's had a similar conversation with Ron before, after the Battle of Hogwarts. If either of them died, the other was free to remarry. It wasn't as if she thought Ron needed her permission (nor did she need Ron's) but just because she'd rather Ron be happy, with her or without her.

Her mind flashes to that picture in the _Prophet_ , that kiss that wasn’t really, and she forces it out of her mind. Ron had not. Ron would never. It was just the stupid tabloid stirring up shite, yet again. She reminds herself that the freedom of the press was necessary to the function of a proper democracy. It doesn’t help much.

“Inside, next?” Harry asks.

“Yeah.” Hermione turns to Ginny. “What kind of defences do you have on the front door?”

“We kept it locked,” Ginny replies. “But nothing else.” Her tone turned slightly defensive.

Harry reached an arm out towards Ginny. “It’s not your fault...I didn’t think anyone could make it past our wards...” he says, trying to reassure her despite the fact that she can’t hear him.

“We’re not blaming you. Either of you,” Bill says, at the same time. “Only the paranoid curses their own front door.”

And they’d all though the _Fidelius_ would have been enough. Hermione leans in, inspects the doorknob carefully. “Ginny?” she asks. “Were these scratches always here?”

Ginny frowns, bends in to look at the doorknob. There are small, thin scratches of the brass near the keyhole. “No. Definitely not.”

Hermione furrows her brow. That’s kind of weird, she thinks. She knows that Harry and Ginny didn’t bother with the actual key to their house, which was somewhere in a drawer in the study. They’d use _Alohomora_ instead. Most witches and wizards would use _Alohomora_. But the intruder...hadn’t?

Odd.

Hermione and Bill check the door for trace magic, one after the other, but they don’t find any. Ginny unlocks the door, letting them in. It’s a muggle house, not a wizarding one, so there’s no fireplace in the entryway. As she enters, Hermione picks into the layer of wards again, feeling the Anti-Apparition Charm as a light buzz across her skin.

Harry and Ginny’s taste of décor was rather quaint, if simple. The entryway’s painted crème and leads most directly to an open sitting area and a kitchen, the two separated by a chest-high counter and two bar stools. The stairs protrude from the back wall of the sitting area and lead to the upstairs bedrooms, which Hermione knows are outfitted as guest rooms for now. Downstairs, a hallway off the sitting area leads to Harry and Ginny’s study and bedroom.

Hermione considers the entryway first. There’s a shoe-and-coat rack taller than she is. Quite deep, too, with plenty of room; the type of coat rack owned by someone who had a lot of friends and had them over often. The door’s slightly open and she can see a cloak in Harpies green. Ginny’s, then.

There’s nothing else of note in the entryway, so Hermione inspects the sitting area next, despite the fact that she remembers it quite well. There’s a bunch of overstuffed couches around a low coffee table, and a matching rocking chair with a warm, rather tattered-looking knit blanket. Next to one of the couches, there’s a large, wooden chest, and the lamp perched on top of it looks like one of those old-fashioned gas lamps, although it’s actually powered by magic. Hermione knows that the chest, if opened one way, revealed a motley collection of board games, and opened the other way to reveal throw pillows and more blankets. A thick rug covers the floor, and it has an abstract pattern to better hide stains. The kitchen is to her left; the large, stone fireplace is there (but it’s not relevant, the perp didn’t take the Floo. Why did the perp not take the Floo? Just to be safe, Hermione checks the wards on the Floo. Again, nothing.) If it weren’t for the moving portraits on the walls and the lack of a television, Harry and Ginny’s sitting room could almost pass as Muggle. But looks are deceiving here; most of the furniture is imbued with magic. The coffee table can grow or shrink; the couches will expand to accommodate any number of guests. Even the room itself would expand as needed – a good thing, too, as it seems like there are more and more Weasleys every day.

Hermione closes her eyes and inspects the magic in the room. It’s not a ward, but it can still trap magical signatures. The perp shouldn’t even have noticed as he passed through. But Hermione finds nothing unexpected, just signatures corresponding to the Weasley clan and friends thereof. So weird. Most perps left their magical signature everywhere. This one seems to have found a way around that. And it’s _systematic_ , not ward-by-ward. So far, he hasn’t screwed up once.

Hermione turns towards Bill. “I’m getting nothing. You?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing. You have a very careful perp on your hands.”

“What if...what if he’s figured a way around the detection spell?” Harry asks. “He’s still leaving his magical signature; he’s just figured a way to make it undetectable. That might be easier.”

Hermione’s first instinct is to declare that impossible. But magic had an annoying ability to accommodate all sorts of impossibilities. She closes her eyes to think. Options:

  1. The perp managed to avoid walking through this space. But that doesn’t explain the lack of magical signature on the wards. Maybe he lowered the Anti-Apparition Charm and put it back up again? (No, no, he didn’t. Hermione checks the Charm; she’d been the one to cast that one originally, and the Charm still bears traces of her own magic.) Or maybe he found a way around _that_ to? (Seemed unlikely.) Or maybe he didn’t enter through the front door after all? Maybe he scratched up the keyhole to send Aurors down the wrong trail? ( _Note to self: Check the window in the bedroom._ )
  2. The perp managed to get around _all_ of the wards, and was careful enough to avoid leaving his magical signature _anywhere_. The biggest problem with that is that Harry and Ginny’s house had two layers of wards – one on the property line, one on the house itself. And while a perp could stand on the street and study the ones on the property line (probably while invisible; would have looked weird to the Muggles outside otherwise), he probably wouldn’t be able to examine the ones on the house from the street. Which meant that if this was the case, the perp would have had to make multiple visits. Which was quite possible, given that this particular perp seemed to have a way to become invisible.  
  
In general, becoming invisible was _expensive_. There was a potion that could do it, or one could wear a cloak made from demiguise hair. There was also the Disillusionment Charm, but that wouldn’t hold up to close inspection. Plus, both Neville and Ginny had seen the perp invisible…  
  
_Wait a_ minute. In both cases, the perp was visible only due to an item of clothing: a cloak at Hogwarts, gloves and a mask here. Why would a perp who could afford invisibility then screw it up with _clothing_?  
  
Hermione puts a pin in that thought and moves on the final option.
  3. The perp managed to get around the magical signature detection spell. Hermione had never seen anything like that before; in the eleven years she’s been with the DMLE, first as an investigator and later as a prosecutor. She’d ask Vera for reference material later. Maybe she’ll be able to scare up a different spell to detect magical traces; if the perp had managed a way around the detection spell, a different spell might reveal the traces.



Hermione relays Harry’s words to Bill, who confirms that he hasn’t seen anything like that either. “But it could happen, I guess,” he says with a shrug. “Magic.”

 _Magic_. The thing that made life so much easier for witches and wizards was also the thing that was a thorn in the side of any investigator. Muggles were limited in what they could do, which made physical evidence so much easier to gather. A perp might touch a light switch, leaving a fingerprint. He may leave footprints where he walks. When a perp killed, his victim had a chance of fighting back and trapping skin cells from the perp under their fingernails. A perp might drive past a toll booth, and the toll worker might remember him. There’s even an increasingly large number of surveillance cameras (as Hermione found out, to her chagrin, when a bunch of drunk wizards accidentally Apparated to the middle of a bank, and the Obliviators hadn’t dealt with the surveillance recordings because _they hadn’t known about them_. The DMLE had only found out when the videos popped up on the Muggle video-sharing site of YouTube. Thankfully, they managed to pass it off as a ‘technical glitch’. But it was a close call, and given the increasing number of surveillance cameras, it wouldn’t take long before magic got caught on film again.)

But a wizard? A wizard used his wand for light, to unlock doors, and never had to touch anything. He used _Avada Kevada_ to kill, typically from a distance and from behind as much cover as possible. He could (and likely would) change his appearance using a number of different methods. He left significantly less physical evidence – mostly just magical traces. Investigations, in the magical world, tended to fall upon two things: motive and means.

And means weren’t simple either. While plenty of spells had names that’d suggest that they were undefeatable (such as the Unbreakable Vow), the truth was nothing was absolute in the magical world. Sometimes, it was just a matter of will: it was possible, if difficult, to lie under _Veritaserum_. Sometimes, it was a matter of understanding magical theory: while the Killing Curse could not be blocked by magical means, it would be blocked by sufficiently thick plywood. And sometimes, all it took was a cunning mind to see an opening: Hermione’s prosecuted one case where the perp, unable to reach his wife because she was behind a _Fidelius_ , Owled her a cursed letter. And finally, there were the oddities, the unique magical artefacts, of which the best example was the Elder Wand. These were typically poorly understood if only because the owners liked keeping the abilities of their artefacts secret.

Hermione pushes these thoughts away. She’s here to figure out the means behind Harry’s murder, after all. She should focus on that.

A hallway leads from the sitting area to the study and master bedroom. There are more wards on the door to this hallway, and again Hermione finds nothing on them. The bedroom is at the end of the short hallway, but Hermione checks over the study first. The room is clearly divided in half with two desks and two bookshelves, and Hermione suspects that if she were to check the original floor plan, she’d find that this room has been enlarged. It has one real window, on Ginny’s side of the room, and one magical window, on Harry’s, and the room is comfortable if utilitarian, with simple furniture. There’s another knit throw draped over the back of Ginny’s chair, and the two lamps in the room aren’t identical – Ginny’s is taller, more ornamental, and brass; Harry’s is short, more utilitarian, black, and has an attached inkwell. Harry’s desk is as messy as his desk in the Ministry – binders and case files everywhere, biscuits shelved on the bookcase, broken quills used as bookmarks. A Foe Glass perches on top of a stack of books, and a Sneakoscope sits perched on the base of Harry’s lamp. Hermione ignores the pile of case files for now since the faster way to figure out what Harry’s been working on would be to ask him. Instead, she looks in the top desk drawer for the copies of Harry and Ginny’s address.

The top desk drawer is significantly deeper than she expected. Harry must have deepened them again; inside are six opened packets of biscuits, a bunch of plastic takeaway sporks, a lot of crumpled paper, and a year’s supply of ink. And under the ink, there’s the piece of parchment with Harry and Ginny’s address written on it twenty times. It’s protected by additional wards, which are also untouched. Hermione turns to Ginny. “Can you get me a list of people who would know your address?”

Ginny nods. “I gave one to Ron, but I can make a copy and Owl it to you.”

Hermione looks at Harry, and he nods in response. “I’ll see if I have anything to add.” He shifts awkwardly from foot to foot. “And, and I guess you should take these back to the Ministry, yeah?” he gestures at all the case files. “Since they’re Ministry property, after all.”

Hermione nods, and then she and Bill look the entire room over for magical traces. Bill looks through Ginny’s desk while Hermione makes a valiant attempt to look through Harry’s, but it’s clear that his method of organizing consisted only of enlarging the drawers and shoving more things inside, over and over again. And yet again she fails to find any unexpected magical traces. (She no longer expects to.) And just to be through, she checks Ginny’s reading nook, which surrounds the window with cushions. Again, nothing, but she expects that by now.

Finally, the bedroom, the room where Harry died. The room is dominated by the bed and its navy-blue bedspread, and there’s a pair of matching nightstands with matching lamps, which had matching navy-blue lampshades. At the foot of the bed, there’s a large dresser, and there’s a wardrobe on the right side. All the furniture is lightly-stained oak. The doorway to the bathroom is on the left side of the bedroom, and there’s a single real window to the right. The walls and ceiling, however, are entirely covered in magical window, which makes the room almost feel like it’s outdoors. Hermione closes her eyes and images the scene, the scene of her best friend’s death. She can’t really place where the perp entered yet but she assumes the door, and she doesn’t quite know how Harry died yet so she imagines the perp cowering almost in the doorway, pulling his wand out, and...and what? Hermione doesn’t know, won’t know until the tox screen comes back. She focuses on what she can do now.

On the nightstand on the left, which had been Harry’s side of the bed, there’s another Foe Glass and a Sneakoscope. Hermione pauses. “These didn’t go off?”

Ginny shakes her head. “The Sneakoscope, no. The Foe Glass? I might have seen something in it, but I’m not sure.” Harry confirms with a nod.

 _Odd_. Hermione’s not sure what it means. It could mean, for example, that the perp was perfectly trustworthy, since being trustworthy and being murderous weren’t actually contradictory. He could have been perfectly forthright about his murderous intentions, and perps fueled by righteous rage often did not set off Sneakoscopes. But, no, the perp had made himself invisible; that indicates some amount of deception. It should have gone off. Why didn’t it? She checks the window in the bedroom for magical traces, thinking over all the things she’s noticed: the utter lack of magical traces, the scratches on the lock, the unresponsive Sneakoscope.

Normally, Hermione loves this type of chase, this type of mystery, where she has to unravel the magic the perp used to commit his crimes and bring him to justice. But now, it’s all she can do to remain detached.

* * *

When Ron gets to his office, he finds an angry Millicent Bulstrode waiting for him. “Your mistress broke into my lab,” she informs him.

Ron doesn’t bother responding to the _mistress_ comment. If he tries to defend himself, the office-wide mocking would just continue. The damned _Prophet_ had taken everything out of context, as usual, and it didn’t help that it was Menendez, the very Auror he was investigating for Harry’s murder. She’d been on the trail of two men who’d been slipping love potions into the drinks of young women at three different bars, and she’d cornered him and kissed him just to avoid breaking her cover. Unfortunately, the _Prophet_ managed to get a photo, and annoyingly, the _Prophet_ hadn’t seen fit to report that he’d instinctively decked her. All of this had been quite unfair to Hermione. Luckily, the _Prophet_ hadn’t figured out the identity of the “mystery woman”, despite the fact that the whole damned department had managed to figure it out. And while most of the teasing had died down, some people still kept with it.

During the debrief, after that case, Menendez’d apologized for the kiss and he’d apologized for punching her, and Ron had honestly thought that was the last of _that_ matter. But he has no doubt that Menendez’s wife will bring it up in court, and he’s not looking forward to that bullshit again. Fucking CLL.

“I’ll look into it,” Ron says, walking into his office and riffling through the parchments in his inbox for the tox screen. “Not finished with the tox screen yet?”

“No,” she replies. “And you’re not changing the topic.”

Ron sighs internally. “Lead the way.” He’ll check the Trace later; he doesn’t want this Trace to become public knowledge yet.

The forensics lab is two floors below the Auror bullpen according to the Ministry lifts, although frankly they could have been anywhere in the general vicinity since nothing prevents the magical lifts from temporarily disengaging with space-time. Bulstrode’s been the Head of Forensics for about a year, and she usually defended her turf from the Auror Department zealously. Of the various rooms Forensics occupied, Ron’s only been in the antechamber and the conference rooms because Forensics needed to been seen as independent from the Aurors. They needed to be a neutral third party trusted both by the defence and the prosecutor at trial.

But now Bulstrode’s guiding him towards what looks like an autopsy room, although there’s no cadaver currently in it. Ron inspects the wards to the room as he walks in, and he finds the traces of a wand made from...what was that...Western redbud, with a core of a Thunderbird feather, quite short (around seven inches), quite stiff. He doesn’t need to look this wand up in the database to guess at who it belongs to (Thunderbirds are native to Alta California), but he pulls out a Search Quill from his robes and a little bit of parchment anyways, writing down all the details of the wand. He pauses and then adds _“also check immigration db”._ Then, he flicks the Quill up into the air, and the parchment folds itself into the shape of an aeroplane. The Quill tucks itself into the aeroplane and rides it out of the room, headed for the lifts.

Then, Ron turns towards Bulstrode. “Why do you think she was here? Walk me through it.”

She gestures towards the open doorway. “Came in this morning to find that my wards had been tampered with. Luckily, didn’t have a corpse in here, or your pretty lady’d be guilty of evidence tampering.”

Oh. This might be a problem. While every doorway of Forensics had its own wards, keyed to only the lab techs, Harry’s murderer seemed to be able to waltz through most wards without leaving a trace, and Menendez could have easily intentionally left magical traces to throw them off. He would have to check the Trace for this, too, because the only bit of concrete physical evidence they had was the compound used to poison Harry, and a smart perp would sneak in to destroy this as soon as possible. “How do you know she didn’t go any further?”

Bulstrode points to the decorative chandelier hanging from the ceiling. “You’re not supposed to know this, but that records the room.” She grins. “You can view the recording; just turn the Pensieve around,” she says, gesturing at the cabinet in the corner.

Ron does as he is told, although he’s never seen a Pensieve that changed behaviour based on orientation. In it, he sees Menendez stride in, bold as can be, headed straight towards the Pensieve. She ducks her head into it for nearly fifteen minutes before rising and leaving. “You know what she accessed?” Ron asks Bulstrode.

“I don’t know; the Pensieve doesn’t log which memories were accessed.” She pauses. “We do have three blood samples from an active case of hers. Something to do with a badly-brewed batch of Wit-Sharpening Potion. She dropped off the samples on Tuesday and we haven’t been working on them, well, because your case is more important.”

Ron ignores that; it’s not really a defence, really, _I broke into your lab because you weren’t answering my messages_. “I assume you have defences against Invisibility Cloaks?” He’s more and more convinced that there’s at least one accomplice; perhaps while Menendez pretended to check the Pensieve, the accomplice had gone further into the lab, under some sort of Invisibility Cloak (and the perp had been invisible when she’d attacked Hogwarts). “No sign of any intrusion elsewhere?”

Bulstrode nods. “Nothing has been disturbed. And we do have defences. When none of us are here, we bounce a high-frequency sound wave off of everything. Like the Muggle...what was it called again? Like a Muggle radar,” she says as if no one would think of using a Muggle-inspired detection method.

But Menendez was Muggleborn. She probably would have known about ‘radar’, Ron thinks. He should ask Hermione if Muggles had any way of evading this ‘radar’. (Sure, she shouldn’t have known about Bulstrode’s defensive measures, but better safe than sorry. While most perps weren’t nearly as creative as the Auror Department, and there was no reason to think that even an Auror-turned-evil would be different, it’d take just one bad assumption to lead them down the wrong path, and Ron’s long learned to not underestimate perps. Even if most of them turned out to be dumb.)

“And are you sure that there’s no way around that?” Ron asks Bulstrode.

“At this distance? No. No Muggle way. Far too close. Even if she showed up dressed head-to-toe in EM-absorbing plastic, she wouldn’t evade the spell,” Bulstrode replies. “I don’t know of a magical way.”

Okay, maybe he shouldn’t assume that every Pureblood was as misinformed about the Muggle world as his own father was. “Gotcha. Now, how’s that tox screen going?”

“About that,” she says. She pauses, gathering her thoughts. “I’ve yet to isolate a potion, and...and I’d like to bring in some outside help.”

Something in the stiff way she says those words worries Ron. “Go on,” he says.

“He was the best in our year at potions,” she says.

And Ron’s heart sinks. Because she’s referring to Draco Malfoy. “I’ll think about it,” he stalls.

“Don’t spend too long thinking,” she warns. “If you want this done quickly…”

Ron nods and heads back to the lifts. On the way, he’s intercepted by the Search Quill he sent out earlier. It confirms what he expected: _Valerie Menendez, six and three-fourths inches, Western redbud with a core of Thunderbird feathers. Wand checked at immigration 17 June 2008_.

* * *

Hermione stops by Gringotts, withdraws some money from the Reform Party’s account. Sometime last night, the thought came to her: while she couldn’t use the full coercive power of the state against a political opponent, nothing prevented her from using the party machinery. (In fact, it was _expected_.) And that meant an owl to Adam Panasovych Serdyuk and Lumos, Reform’s usual opposition research firm.

Standing at just under six feet tall, Serdyuk’s wiry build and close-cropped hair made him look like he could pick up a second job as an extra playing Russian thugs for telly. He was, however, actually of Ukrainian descent, and he’d grown up in Great Britain (his parents had left Ukraine just after the collapse of the USSR), and he’s another Hogwarts alum, four years behind Hermione. When Shacklebolt’d started turning the government towards democracy in the early 2000s, Serdyuk’d seen an opening and taken it, becoming the primary private investigator for Reform. He’d later turned it into a business, Lumos.

Hermione next checks her inbox. There’s one message from Ron, something about radar and Bulstrode wanting to bring in Draco fucking Malfoy into the case. Hermione sets Vera to searching for information, and then writes Ron back, telling him that she’ll have information on radar shortly, and if Bulstrode thought it was a good idea to bring in the ferret, then bring in the ferret. She also asks Ron for the list of people Harry and Ginny had allowed through their _Fidelius_.

Next up: a note from Susan Bones, now Reform’s Whip in the House of Representatives, about the budget. The god damned budget. Again. It didn’t balance because no one wanted to realize the obvious and implement higher taxes. Before 1998, there’d been no taxes at all. Instead, the Ministry ran on ‘donations’ from certain families (and rewarded those families with seats on the Wizengamot). That system left them entirely beholden to a few rich pureblood families, so when Voldemort had shown up, it’d folded quite quickly. (Some ministry workers had formed a resistance of sorts, and some made an attempt at fighting from the inside, but both these were relatively few in number. Hermione hadn’t known about any of this until after the Insurrection, as she’d spent most of the time of Voldemort’s reign hiding.) And while Shacklebolt had wanted to implement taxes post-Insurrection, he’d known that it wouldn’t go over very well. So, instead, the Confiscation Act, which took money primarily from rich Voldemort supporters. And a few years later, a small income tax. But it wasn’t enough, and everyone knew it, and it was up to Bones to figure out a way to raise taxes without pissing everyone off.

Hermione really didn’t want to think about the difficult task of the bloody budget for now, so she pulled the next task from her inbox. That one was easier – a couple of parents wanted an organization to validate potion quality after their children had fallen ill from a bad batch of Wit-Sharpening Potion. The children had all recovered, and this type of regulation tended to be much easier to push through. She considers her MPs and then forwards the note to one of younger ones who could do with the good press. Then she continues going through her inbox, thanking her ability to compartmentalize and keep the government running even with...everything else, and occasionally asking Harry for his input.

Less than thirty minutes after she’d sent the note, Hermione watches Serdyuk steps through Hermione’s Floo through a mirror on her desk. He greets Vera, accepts a cup of tea from her, and waits for Hermione to call in into her inner office. Also Hermione’s desk, there’s one of those little physics toys – one of the ones with five metal balls that swing back and forth – that always seems to appear in stock images of executive offices in the Muggle world, and George’s connected Vera to it so the balls will move in specific ways to indicate various things. Two balls meant _visitor_ , and Hermione taps the right side of the toy to indicate _let him in_.

(Okay, the toy was kind of cute in a bad-movie-opsec kind of way, but Hermione would rather have a less cryptic communication system with her magical secretary. Maybe via the mirror?)

“I had an interesting anonymous tip come in,” she tells him. No need to tell him this ‘tip’ is actually direct from her. “I’d like for you to take a look at the Parkinsons.”

“Thaddeus?” he asks.

“Yes,” she replies. “But also, his daughter. The tip said that she was acting more secretive than usual.” Serdyuk understands the dynamics of the Parkinsons. It’s not like it’s the first time he’d looked into them. He knows, also, that some in Reform see Thaddeus as one of the last free Death Eaters and would salivate at the chance to remove him from power. He has been Reform’s oppo for years, after all.

“That’s not much to go off of,” Serdyuk replies.

“She looked dishevelled and not put together,” Hermione says, letting Serdyuk fill in the blanks – that it was indeed quite odd for Pansy Parkinson to be less than fashionably well-dressed. The less she had to say, the more plausible deniability she had. “If there’s some scandal we can use, I want to know about it.”

He nods. “I’ll take a look. Usual contract?”

She hands over the Galleons, and he gives her some parchment to sign. It’s his usual rate for a specific job – four Galleons an hour, four thousand Galleons up front. And then he leaves, via Floo.

Harry, who’s been silent so far, says, “I’ve never liked that guy.”

Hermione raises an eyebrow at him. It’s an argument that they’d had before. Harry didn’t like the idea of opposition research and didn’t understand why the official power of the state to investigate couldn’t be used. “If he finds anything incriminating, you know that I’ll ‘have to’ turn it over to the Aurors. The fact that _he_ found it will make it partisan, but if he finds something serious, the partisan shadow won’t matter. I get my investigation without getting my hands dirty.”

“Timing’s a bit dubious, though, eh? Asking him now, just after Hogwarts and my death? Would look terrible in the press.”

Hermione smiles. “If all they have is _the timing_ , well, I can live with that.” Because Thaddeus Parkinson would be the type to murder for the Elder Wand, and if there was even a chance that his daughter was up to something, she’d want to know.

Plus, if it was something as mundane as a hidden boyfriend, she’d have good oppo from that, at least.

* * *

Ron finds Percy in his office. Merlin. He’s not going to get an uninterrupted hour to look through the Trace anytime soon. “Yes?” he says, as a greeting.

“You should have told me you punched her,” Percy replies.

“She kissed me.” He remembers this clearly, the shock and confusion, how he’d frozen despite all his instincts to yell, to fight her off. She’d walked straight up to him, bold as brass, leaned over him with one hand on his hip, and planted a kiss directly on his lips. It’d taken him just a second too long to react, long enough for the _Prophet_ to get a picture, and when he did react, he did so instinctively. He hadn’t gone for his wand at all. He’d simply decked her, knocked her off balance so badly that she’d tripped over the skinny tall heels of her shoes and fallen over. And then, he’d fled.

He hadn’t recognized her. She’d been undercover. He’d only found the memory when he’d escaped back home. He’d been in the middle of checking his pockets before dropping his robes in the laundry (because Hermione had told him off about parchment in his pockets just the weekend before) when he’d found the memory, sealed with the signature charm the Auror department used. He’d watched it, growing increasingly horrified as he realized what it was.

It’d be a hell of a case. It’d originated with just reports of women appearing, confused and newly Oblivated (with their own wands), outside of various bars. The first had been early November, terrible weather, all cold and drizzly. They’d found remnants of love potion in the victim’s blood, and all the attacks had taken place well after midnight, so Ron had given the case to Menendez. And for the next four months, there’d been at least two or three new vics per week, some Muggle, some witches, and Ron had had a hard time getting the media to care. The general consensus was that these women deserved, because of what they wore. Because of the fact that they’d been drinking. Because of whatever reason the _Prophet_ could find in their pasts. Slut-shaming was sadly still the norm.

There had been a pair of perps, and they’d taken prisoners, as Ron found out when he watched Menendez’s memories. She’d managed to catch the eye of one of the perps, gotten him to dose her drink. A bit of a slight of hand let her pretend to drink it, and he’d taken her to his...well, lair was the only way to put it.

Of the thirty-seven women this particular pair had taken to the lair, they’d kept three. Eleanor Harrison, a thirty-two-year-old with long, styled blonde hair who worked for the Ministry’s Accounting Department. Freya Clarke, eighteen, who always sported dramatic eye makeup despite the fact that she interned for the _Times_. Heidi Coleman, who at twenty-six, wanted nothing more than to take her lovely auburn hair and green eyes and turn them into a modelling career. All three had been tied up to a bed in the bastard’s basement, drugged to complacency, and raped and Oblivated over and over again. Oblivation wasn’t a nice spell – once or twice it was probably without side effects, but it’d eventually permanently damage the mind. They were lucky to have escaped the Janus Thickey ward, but all three were mere shadows of their former selves. Maybe in time, Harrison would be able to return to her position with the Ministry, but it wasn’t likely. Clarke’s career at the _Times_ was almost certainly over. Coleman had held up fairly well, though, all things considered; she and Ron had had a lovely conversation on how to use makeup charms to make one nearly unrecognizable.

There’d been other Aurors working these disappearances, of course, but Menendez had stumbled upon them first, working a case that not many people took seriously and no one thought was related. Crimes like this were rare enough in the magical community (after all, there were only about a half-million witches and wizards spread across Great Britain), so the fact that the case had been solved just weeks to go to the election had been such a lucky break for Reform. All it’d taken to convict the two were Menendez’s memories. Ron’d been right impressed with her when she’d taken the stand for this case, her cool, poised demeanour juxtaposing well with just how much personal danger she’d put herself in to solve this case. She’d never shared how she managed to get out of that basement without breaking cover, but somehow she’d found her way back to that bar, and she’d kissed the first Auror she recognized. She later told him, during debrief, that all she could think of was not breaking cover. Not letting the perps know that she’d gotten away with her memories intact, with enough evidence to put both of them away, because she knew they’d flee if they found out.

Over the next week, they found and arrested both of the bastards (Menendez had managed to tag both with the Trace), put them on trial, and a jury found them both guilty. Seventy-five years in Azkaban, each, but it wasn’t enough, as far as Ron was concerned, especially since with credit for good behaviour, the arseholes could be up for parole in less than twenty-five years, and Azkaban wasn’t even that bad anymore, not after Hermione’s reforms went through. The Dementors had been replaced with “re-integration” programs. Now, convicted felons got to colour about their feelings in prison.

Percy’s words interrupt Ron’s thoughts. “I said that’s not a defence, are you even listening to me?”

“Okay, okay,” Ron backs up a few steps. “Look, there’s nothing to be done about that now. She apologized, I apologized. She probably won’t bring it up, and if she does I can point out that what _she_ did is sexual assault. What else did you find?”

Percy shakes his head and sighs, but he moves on. “Do you want the good news first or the bad?” he asks.

Ron doesn’t really care; he’s not much of a fan of these Sherlockian games of Percy’s. “Good,” he says, just to keep the conversation moving.

Percy opens his briefcase and pulls out a few documents. “I’ve called around, pulled some records from her time in California. And I found something interesting.” He sets the papers down on Ron’s desk and turns them so Ron can read them. “So. Remember the Kayla Brennan case?”

Ron did. Kayla Brennan had shot her Veela mate, Edward Hancock in the granny flat of her parents’ house in North Ireland in 2003. It should have been an easy case – Brennan confessed. Her barrister wanted to plead self-defence, lower the charge to voluntary manslaughter.

Instead, the case turned into a political football, the type of clusterfuck that drew in plenty of busybodies and onlookers. The Hancocks were an old Pureblood family that had fled to New Avalon during the Insurrection, and they’d returned to England only to have their only son exhibit signs of creature blood, fall in love with a headstrong Muggleborn, the daughter of farmers for Merlin’s sake. And she killed him. With a gun, a muggle weapon, not even a bloody spell. As if she wasn’t even a witch. The Hancocks had gone after both Brennan and her barrister, and her barrister had retaliated with the _Veela Panic_ defence, claiming that young Hancock had such terrified her client with his nonhuman behaviour that she’d panicked and murdered him.

It was a bigoted, absolutely absurd defence.

Worse, the case law was on her side.

The case had eventually gotten settled out of court, to no one’s satisfaction. Shacklebolt had quickly pushed through a regulation banning the Veela Panic defence, and that was the end of the matter, but even seven years later you could get a lively debate going in a bar by asking whether or not Brennan’s sentence was just.

“Yes, what about it?” Ron asks Percy.

“Remember who Brennan’s barrister was?”

Ron pauses. “Jessica Compton. Menendez’s wife. Why?”

“The Hancocks hit everyone with a subpoena in that trial, remember? Compton, her parents, her law school professors, her then-girlfriend? Who lived in Los Angeles?”

“Yes. And?”

“Well, the process server had a hell of a time finding her. Her registered address, at that time, was her parents’ house in Westwood, but she hadn't been living there.”

Ron remembers now. “She’d been living out of her car.” It’d made no sense. Menendez had been an Auror working with the Los Angeles Police Department, the LAPD, at the time. (Her resume claimed the 77th Street Community Police Station). He’d looked it up, back then, wondering about the feasibility of driving like a Muggle. Given that it was Los Angeles with its legendarily bad traffic, 77th street would likely be a fair bit of a drive from Westwood, but _Menendez_ _was a witch who should have been able to Apparate_. And given the fact that she drew a salary from both LAPD and Alta California, she should have been able to easily afford an apartment, if not a house. Long commutes did not matter to a witch, after all. She could Apparate. Or Floo. Or gotten herself a Portkey subscription. Or, heck, commuted via broomstick. Witches and wizards had plenty of transportation options Muggles didn’t.

Percy nods. “So. I went back through and looked. She’s a registered voter in the state of California, which makes this a lot easier. 1996 and 1998 have her registered in Westwood, with her parents. But 2000 and 2002 have her registered in South L.A. Athens,” Percy says as if the last word should have meant something to Ron.

“She had a place of her own?”

“And not too shabby, either, it’s a pretty decent neighbourhood, especially for South L.A. Lots of Hispanics, lots of ex-Vietnam,” Percy says as if he’d actually been there to visit. More likely, he’d pulled the demographics from some book or another.

“Which she gives up, in favour of living out of her car.”

“Odd, isn’t it? Living out of a car like a Muggle. A down-on-her-luck witch would probably squeeze out some wizarding space for herself, somewhere. Anyway. The story doesn’t end there. She moves her voter registration back to her parents in Westwood by 2004, and there it stays. She’s still registered to vote, by the way. Voted in the 2008 presidential elections. In November.”

“And?” Ron asks. He doesn’t think it’s odd that a citizen of Alta California still cared enough to vote in elections back home.

“Well, in February of 2004, less than a year after she’d been caught living in her car, she buys a house. In Westwood. But she doesn’t move her voter registration there, it’s still at her parents’. Doesn’t change her drivers license, doesn’t move her bank account’s address.” Percy pauses for effect, but Ron doesn’t quite get what Percy’s getting at. Percy sighs. “Westwood is pretty expensive these days, Ron, with UCLA right there. It’s like if a homeless man picked up a place in London. And, no, her salary isn’t enough to cover.”

“And if she could afford it, why not move in?” Ron muses. “She obviously didn’t; she would have moved her bank account if that was the case.” He knows a bit of how Muggle banking works, and he knows that Muggles get their spending records Owled – or their version of Owled, anyway – to them every month. He can’t imagine sending his spending record to his parents if he had another option.

“There’s more,” Percy says. “She buys another house, August 2005. In San Francisco.” He gives Ron a meaningful look.

“I’m sorry, I’m not quite up to speed on Muggle California’s property values.”

“Los Angeles and San Francisco are both some of the most expensive property markets in the United States.” At Ron’s somewhat blank look, Percy reminds him. “Roanoke, most of Alta California, Tejas, and bits of New Avalon? Muggle government for most of the middle of the continent? She must have pulled together a lot of money in a very short time frame. Muggle money. Dollars.”

“I know what the United States is,” Ron snaps. Never mind that he’d had been trying to recall exactly what land it occupied. “And I’m guessing you found where the money came from?”

“No, but I do have a guess.” Percy pulls out a photograph from his briefcase. “This is the Ashcroft mansion.”

“And?” Ron asks.

“Don’t you think it’s quite peculiar, a Squib named Ashcroft?”

Ron raises an eyebrow. “No? And please get to the point.”

“Well, the Ashcrofts are Pureblood. And not just Pureblood, they’re the type of Pureblood arseholes who give the rest of us bad names. They’d never admit to Squibbing. If they Squibbed, then they’d definitely disinherit and exile the poor kid. They’d _never_ let him keep the surname, and they certainly wouldn’t let him inherit.”

“And yet Laurent Ashcroft did keep his surname.” Ron remembers, now, the Ashcrofts, an old family reduced by severe inbreeding. Henry and Margie Ashcroft had been double first cousins. They’d gotten married in 1937, and they’d had one son, Laurent, who turned out to be a Squib, and who had effectively left the magical world when he was seventeen. His parents had never been the same, and they’d slowly withdrawn from the community as well. Sometime in the 1980s, the Ashcrofts withdrew completely to hide in their mansion. And there they stayed until they’d been discovered dead in 2009. A magical accident, apparently.

That’d been another one of Menendez’s cases, to think of it. Odd.

As the Ashcroft fortune couldn’t go to Laurent, a Squib, it was currently being held by the Ministry, and any heir had a year to show up and claim...it. That year was almost up, wasn’t it? He guesses where Percy’s going. “So you don’t know who she got the money from originally, but you think she needs to pay it back, and this is how?”

Percy nods. “Menendez didn’t sell either property when she left Alta California. And, hate to say it, but no one volunteers to work the night shift without a damned good reason. Especially when, well...”

“Well, what?”

Percy pulls out Menendez’s resume. “Quantico. Twice, even.” When Ron shows no sign of comprehension, Percy elaborates. “It’s not just a training school. It’s one of the FBI’s training academies, and getting to attend a program there means your department thinks you’re going to be really useful to them. So she’s not just leaving some expensive real estate – that she has to pay property taxes on, mind – but a career that should have been going somewhere. To start at the lowest run, the night shift, in another country, where her strongest ties are her wife and...Laurent Ashcroft.”

“So, what ties her to Ashcroft?”

Percy removes another photograph from his briefcase. “That would be the bad news. Well, for your warrant, at least. So, Ashcroft. He must have left after he was disowned, and gone pretty far. Where did he go? Luckily, he didn’t change his name, so it was easy to trace him, all the way to California. This is a photo of the 75th Infantry (Ranger), Company R, circa 1967. This is José Menendez, Valerie’s father. And this is Laurent Ashcroft.” The two men are kneeling next to each other, in the front row of the photograph. Ashcroft has his rifle propped up against him, and his eyes are dark from under the helmet, but he’s smiling a bit. Menendez has his rifle over his knee, and he looks grim.

“They were friends.”

“Friends and brothers-in-arms. Moved into houses next to each other in Westwood after the war. Menendez gets married, Ashcroft doesn’t. And don’t you think it’s weird that both of them show up again in Great Britain, just before the elder Ashcrofts die?”

Ron thinks of the Ashcroft mansion. He’s never been inside, but he’s heard of just how opulent the place had been in its heyday.

“But they missed a step,” Percy says, “Laurent can’t inherit, he’s a Squib. Unless...”

Ron considers Percy’s theory. It’s...not actually that absurd, he thinks. He’d been mostly looking at the various political groups, he realizes now, because he wants Harry’s death to have been meaningful, to have been some sort of major historical event, and he hadn’t even considered the mundane.

But most crimes were mundane, over money, or over a pretty woman, or so on. “Unless they fixed that,” Ron fills in for Percy. His stomach sinks. He doesn’t like this. But he’ll need to follow the evidence.

“You need to know one final thing,” Percy says. “An Amber Lachman filed for a restraining order against Valerie Menendez in 2008. In the city of Berkeley, just across the bay from San Francisco. It never went anywhere and the case was later dropped. I don’t know why; the court records are quite sparse.”

* * *

Percy leaves and Ron settles down at his desk. He knows, now, why he kept on thinking something was...just off...with Menendez. It hadn’t been the odd encounter outside the funeral home; he’d just leapt on that as the first reasonable-sounding excuse. No, it’d always been gut instinct running here, and Percy was right. No one takes the night shift unless something’s making them, and the details he just got from Percy made things all the more mysterious. She’d lived oddly, Mugglelike, for some reason, and then suddenly came into a lot of money. A few years later, she’d left Alta California rather quickly, without selling her houses. And the voter registration record. He couldn’t make sense of it. But as he had no evidence directly tying her to Harry’s murder, he knows he still doesn’t have probable cause.

Well, screw probable cause. He could detain her, drag her into 12 Grimmauld Place and interrogate her. He’d have to be fast about it; she’s still Alta Californian, and if he can’t bring charges against her he’ll have an entire nation (and probably the entire NAC) after him. And her accomplices, whoever they were, could escape.

Ron thinks the plan over and discards it. While the direct path may look appealing, it had serious problems. He wasn’t too worried about the CLL in this instance – they were barristers, after all, not Aurors. All bark, no bite. And Menendez didn’t have too many friends in the department yet, especially since she worked the night shift. No, the problem was that Alta California would get involved as soon as they realized, and they could probably could talk Roanoke onto their side. Menendez was one of their Aurors, and Ron knows that they take loyalty very seriously over there. Their thin blue line. And although Ron can perfectly well imagine himself _Crucio_ -ing the information out of her, he knows that a woman who would willingly give herself over to two sexual predators for the sake of a case wouldn’t break easily. Trying the direct path would cause an international kerfluffle that wasn’t necessary, and allow any accomplices to get the fuck out of town. No, he has to build his case in secret, using normal methods, saving his interview with her until the very end.

With a sigh, Ron quickly looks through his inbox. There’s a letter from Immigration, and it’s what he expects. Menendez was on a Tier 2 visa, and she’d entered on the 17th of June 2008. Nothing special, there.

Next up, a letter from David Schwartz, Menendez’s former boss. It’s short and simple: _Dear Auror Weasley, I am certainly willing to talk to you._ _Attached to this letter is a portkey for 11 AM your time if that works for you_. _David._

Ron takes the portkey and checks the clock. He has some time before 11, so he quickly dashes off a reply and sends it to the International Floo’s office: _Certainly. See you then_. Then he sits back and pulls out Menendez’s Tracebook. He can finally review that damned Trace.

Menendez had gotten out of bed at around 5 PM. She spent some time at home, and Ron is forced to awkwardly flip by three pages of Menendez and Compton having sex. (The Trace could be quite invasive.) Then, based on their conversation, they’d cooked and eaten dinner, discussing nothing of importance, although, apparently, Compton was one of the barristers working on Lucius Malfoy’s appeal. Ron reads this section carefully, trying to gather a bit of court strategy, but no luck. He can’t get what Compton says, just Menendez, and Menendez knows little about British appeals (“Didn’t he already get a shot at the Supreme Court?” she had asked at one point, apparently not knowing that it’d been a panel of three judges from said Court, and now Malfoy was appealing the entire Court.)

Around 8 PM, Menendez goes to... a mosque in South London, where she speaks to someone else in Arabic and Ron’s gonna have to get someone else to translate this. The translation spell he uses makes the conversation seem both incredibly stilted and banal, seemingly just about Menendez asking about the general welfare of about at least a dozen different people, but Arabic is one of those languages where context is extremely important, so best to get a human translator still. Then Menendez takes a long, long run that takes about an hour, and apparently sings the whole way because the next twenty pages of the Trace contain fragments of lyrics. Some Ron recognizes, but most he doesn’t. Might have been Muggle.

Then Menendez had returned home in order to write a few letters, and this bit really shows the weaknesses of the Trace. First: the Trace notes down what the target wrote in chronological order, which was incredibly easy to get around when writing letters. One could, for example, keep a stack of envelopes pre-addressed, making it harder to figure out which letter went where. Menendez hadn’t done so, but she’d written the letters first and then addressed the envelopes, so while Ron had the content of three letters and three addresses, she couldn’t figure out which letter went to which address, and unhelpfully Menendez had used only first names: David, Frank, and Mia. Secondly, it was fairly easy to conceal messages in other messages, either in cypher or some sort of coded message or simply by talking via reference for everything.

For example, a paragraph from one of the letters went: _“On the scale from one to Versailles, I’d say we’re about a seven right now. But there’s not a coalition big enough to capitalize on the resentment. Not much risk of 1979.”_ Why Versailles? It was a city in France, Ron knew, but he didn’t know the significance. And 1979? What happened in 1979 in Alta fucking California? (The rest of the letter was fairly generic: a complaint about the weather, a quick update on Magical Britain’s recent elections, and a few questions about the recipient's kids. Nothing useful.)

The other letters were no less cryptic. Another contained a paragraph that was almost purely acronyms: _“_ _According to Laurie,_ _RT variability increased twofold at the very least, FT variability increased as well._ _Of the three CLKs you sent, o_ _nly the quartz CLK kept time;_ _the other two have started lagging_ _. Of the thirty transistors, nine failed entirely; the rest showed a marked increase in internal resistance. VG_ _rose in most, too._ _Can you slice these up and check for inversion layer? Best, XOXO Val_ _”_ Ron wasn’t even going to try to decipher this one. Maybe Hermione could take a crack at it.

At least the third was understandable, if unimportant. _“For example, L. David Mech disavowed the idea of alpha wolves in 1999, and yet werewolves still behave as if they had an alpha pack structure. Perhaps werewolves are different from wolves in general, or perhaps werewolves behave the way we as a society think they should…”_ and it goes on from there, nearly two full pages on werewolf behaviour compared to wolf behaviour.

Menendez seems to be the type to divide any message across multiple letters because none of the three seem complete. For what reason, Ron doesn’t know, but it’s a common enough technique. That way, any individual letter isn’t as useful if intercepted, and it also screws with the Trace.

She’d next Apparated to the Ministry, sending off the letters (all International Floo, one to Alta California, one to Tejas, and one to Japan. Odd.) and reporting to the Auror bullpen just before midnight. She spent the next two hours at her desk at the Ministry writing up case reports; she then snuck down into Forensics. Ron sees her walk into the room with Bulstrode’s Pensieve but she doesn’t go further. Weird.

The next three hours are spent hopping between Muggle London’s bars and small talk (enough that Ron begins to wonder if Menendez’s doing any real work; it certainly doesn’t seem like it, from her words), and Menendez spends the last two hours of her shift in the Ministry libraries, reading but not writing anything down. But she doesn’t go directly home afterwards; she goes instead to Hogsmeade. There’s a long conversation with an apothecary about unseasonable weather and supply difficulties, and then – finally – Menendez goes home, probably to sleep.

Ron looks up, realizes it’s nearly eleven and makes a quick trip to the cafeteria for a sandwich before taking the Portkey Schwartz had mailed him. He lands somewhere quite cold, which is odd because he’s in a large, mostly empty room that has a mural of a desert and a talking cactus on one wall. The other three walls are floor-to-ceiling window (possibly magical); it appears to be dark outside still. Ron tries to do the time zone conversion in his head – 5 AM? 6 AM? He’s not quite sure. NAC did daylight savings time, and the UK did daylight savings time, but not only did NAC’s daylight savings time not change at the same time as the UK’s, but there were also like four different variants of daylight savings time in NAC, and Ron wasn’t even sure where in NAC he was. Although the cactus did have a speech bubble, saying “Welcome to San Antonio!”. It also had a sombrero, for some reason.

He hears a couple of _clicks_ and suddenly there’s something blowing cold air at him, and while he’s spinning around looking for the source, Schwartz walks in.

Schwartz is tall, but not absurdly so. He and Menendez would be within an inch of each other, Ron thinks, and they have similar builds too. Lean with defined but not bulky muscles. Schwartz's neck is so thick, it’s practically the width of his head, and he’s clean-shaven with hair buzzed very short. Instead of robes, he’s wearing a pair of grey sweatpants and a plain white T-shirt. Schwartz extends a hand. “Nice to meet you.”

Ron takes it. “Nice to meet you too.”

“It’s a bit early, but I brought you tacos.” Schwartz holds up a takeaway bag. “I’ve reserved a room where we can talk.”

“We’re not meeting in your office?” Ron asks.

“Can’t. My office is a SCIF. Protocol.” Schwartz leads the way, through a door somewhat hidden by the mural.

“Your office is a SCIF,” Ron repeats. Merlin. Alta Californians must have picked up a serious hard-on for Muggle protocol in the last decade. Aurors didn’t have SCIFs; they had secure rooms protected by wards, yes, but they wouldn't call them _SCIFs_. Wizards generally preferred acronyms that’d spell out actual words. He reminds himself that he should have no animosity against this man, and follows him down a twisting series of hallways into a plain conference room with a table, two rolling chairs, a whiteboard, and a plastic potted plant. “Where are we?” he asks.

“Uh, it’s a shared meeting space,” Schwartz says. “Rentable by the hour. Some new startup’s put them all over town.” He sweeps his wand around in a long arc, setting up privacy wards, and Ron discreetly gathers Schwartz’s magical signature. Nine and a half inches, sycamore, with a core of cobra lily. He has no doubt that Schwartz will return the favour as soon as he has the chance. They’re Aurors, after all.

Schwartz sits in one of the chairs and gestures to offer the other one to Ron. “I’m guessing this is about the MS Contin?” he says.

It was, in fact, not about the ‘MS Contin’, but Ron wasn’t going to turn down freely offered information. “Yes.”

“Well.” Schwartz leans back into his hair, raising it onto its two back legs. “Val’s dad was an opiate addict. Heroin first, back in ‘Nam, and then I gather he was off it for a long time. Sometime in the early nineties, he took a bullet to the knee and the docs could never reconstruct it right. Docs gave him a script of MS Contin and that was that.” Something in Ron’s face must have convinced Schwartz to elaborate, because he adds, “Precursor to Oxycontin?” He pauses, probably waiting for comprehension, but it’s not like Ron knows what Oxycontin is either. Schwartz tries again. “Sort of like laudanum.”

Laudanum Ron knows about. The final pain potion, the one given only to patients when every other pain potion failed. It could have horrific side effects, but it fucking worked. Sometimes when a patient was put on it, their bodies would adapt to it, learn to crave it, and it’d be next to impossible to get them off it. He’s never seen a case of it, himself, but he’s heard stories before. About how this or that family had a member who was a laudanum addict. Usually, that family member would be hidden away so they wouldn’t bring shame to the whole family. But it wasn’t common – laudanum was used only rarely, and there were plenty of other pain potions that weren’t addictive, if less effective.

“What does this have to do with Valerie?” he asks. His mind races, trying to put together what Schwartz thinks he’s discovered, although it might be a bit late for that, given the fact that he’d obviously not recognized ‘MS Contin’. He can’t raise Schwartz’s suspicions too much; he might warn Menendez.

“Well, he used to shop her around for pills.” Schwartz replies, and Ron must have looked horrified, because Schwartz rushes to add, “No, not like what you’re thinking. Not like that. She had a doctored X-ray of stress fractures in her shins; she’d drive around to different doctors and get them to prescribe pills and he’d take the prescriptions and fill them. Eventually, someone figured it out. She’s permanently banned from filling a ‘script for opiates in California now, but...”

Ron remains quiet, waits for Schwartz to finish his sentence. He can feel that this is something Schwartz’s been wanting to say for a while. He’ll say it, eventually.

“I don’t blame her. For what she did,” Schwartz says, quietly. “It was the only way she had to keep him off of street heroin.” He pauses, thinking, analyzing. “That’s not why you’re here, isn’t it? Why are you here?”

“I need to know about the last few cases she worked on before she left California,” Ron says. He pauses and leaves it at that. He hasn’t quite figured out what he wants to tell Schwartz. Certainly not about the Elder Wand. Previously, his best idea had been to tell Schwartz that Menendez’d gone missing, and he’s just tracking down possible perps. But that’s not going to fly; Schwartz is going to write to Menendez as soon as he steps out of this room, he can tell, and he needs to make sure that when he walks out of the room, the letter Schwartz sends will not alarm Menendez. (He thinks of the three letters Menendez had written yesterday. One to a ‘David’ and Ron thinks there’s a fair chance it’s to Schwartz. If only he knew which letter was which.) Plan B had been to accuse Menendez of something serious but white-collar. A bit of embezzling, maybe a little lifting of evidence. That type of thing. It’d make more sense, with what Schwartz’d told Ron so far. Yeah, he’d do that. Accuse Menendez of walking away with some controlled potion or potions ingredient. That’d be the least likely to raise her suspicions.

“Why?” Schwartz asks. “And here, take a taco, I promise I haven’t poisoned them.”

Ron takes the taco. Looking carefully at Schwartz, he checks the taco for poisons. (If Schwartz gathered Ron's magical signature from that, he's very discreet.) Nothing, but he expected that. He guesses that Schwartz had thought he’d come across something in some database and wondered why Menendez couldn’t, what was it, _fill a ‘script for opiates_ , and he’d taken the meeting to talk Ron out of firing her, this former employee of his. Ron takes another look at Schwartz. For some reason, the man reminds him of Menendez. Not in the way they look; they’re probably not relatives. Schwartz is white; Menendez is Mexican. None of their features are similar except, strangely, their builds. And yet, something in Schwartz's eyes reminds him of Menendez.

“She sure left California in a hurry, it seems. Eight years in the department, and she throws it all away to start at the lowest rung, the night shift, half the world away?” Ron raises an eyebrow for drama. “Tell me about the restraining order.”

“Oh. That.” Schwartz helps himself to a taco. “I should start at the beginning. Since 9/11, we’ve had a certain...baseline paranoia in this country.”

“And?”

“Especially after your Voldemort, we were afraid that a more competent blood supremacist could cause a lot of damage, especially if he attacked our infrastructure. Muggles are incredibly dependent on infrastructure, as you probably well know. ”

Ron didn’t _well know_ , actually, but he nods. He wonders if Schwartz intentionally trying to needle him, to make him feel small and uninformed. Or maybe this is some sort of ruse to prevent him from asking too many questions...

“They pretty much can’t live without electricity, for example. The factories can’t produce, banks can’t make transactions, I even saw a hospital that couldn’t access the medical records because those were electronic as well. So they put a lot of effort into making sure the infrastructure doesn’t fail.”

“And?” Ron asks. “How is all of this relevant to witches and wizards?”

“Well, after 9/11, we wanted to make sure we’d never be attacked like that again. By Muggles...and by wizards. So while we understand the Statue of Secrecy is important, maintaining our infrastructure is more so. We have witches and wizards test and help create contingency plans for our critical infrastructure, and we’d send our Aurors out to help sometimes. So that’s what Valerie was doing, red-teaming Actinide Energy.”

“Red-teaming?” Ron asks. He makes a mental note to tell Hermione about this possible breach of the Statue of Secrecy.

“Ah, yes. We call the team that helps build the systems that defend our infrastructure as the blue team; the red team tests the blue team’s systems. Basically, blue team defends the fort and red team attacks, and they sit down and figure out what needs to be changed to make things more secure. So, in this case, with Actinide Energy, red team focuses on trying to shut down as much of the power supply as possible and blue team tries to make sure that all demand for power is met.”

Ron’s not sure how much he actually understands, but he moves on anyway. (He’ll ask Hermione later. That always works.)

“So. You need to understand that little is off-limits for the red team. If you forbid red team from taking a tactic, then you’ll be undefended if an attacker comes along. Attackers don’t play by rules, yeah? Red team often goes after things like the watchman’s coffee machine, for example, because a sleepy watchman is an inattentive watchman. And Lachman worked for Actinide Energy. My guess is that Val pretended to date her in order to gain access. You know about cell phones, yeah?”

“I know about cell phones,” Ron replied, his tone clipped and short. For Merlin’s sake, he wasn’t a complete dunce, he knew what a bloody cell phone was. But most witches or wizards didn’t carry one; it was too easy to forget you had it and walk into an area with concentrated magic, which would fry the device.

“Oh, okay. Good. Lachman complained that Val was stalking her, showing up at her workplace claiming to look for her. But Lachman has a definite, predictable schedule and each time Val was caught, Lachman wasn’t scheduled to be there. There’s at least one time where cell phone tower evidence shows that Val left Lachman at her apartment, Apparated to Actinide Energy, and then claimed to be searching for her so-called-girlfriend.” He pauses, looks down at his hands. “I don’t like to, you know, refuse to believe victims, but this was pretty obviously Val pretending Lachman’s girlfriend to get deeper into Actinide.” He pauses again. “To be fair, I’m pretty sure Lachman knows and slapped Val with the restraining order to keep her away from Actinide.” He shrugs. “Red team, blue team. Lachman dropped it after Val fucked off to England.”

Ron nods. He doesn’t actually understand, but he’s convinced that further conversation won’t help. He switches topics instead. “So-called girlfriend?”

“Val’s never been one for serious relationships. Other than Compton, who we pretty much didn’t believe existed. You know, like the song” and here Schwartz sings, “ _my girlfriend who lives in Canada_. Except England.” He shrugs. “Guess she was real, after all.”

 _Hmm._ So Menendez had kept quite a bit back from her laid-back boss. “Did she have any enemies? Anyone who’d want her gone?” he asked next.

Schwartz shakes his head. “No. Definitely not.”

Ron pauses, waiting for Schwartz to elaborate.

After a moment of awkward silence, Schwartz continues. “Val’s last case with us was the Actinide Energy, which was a bog-standard red team job that shouldn’t have caused any hard feelings. I know Val was gunning to have them prosecuted for...uh, what was it...insufficient reactive energy capacity, but a charge like that isn’t worth anyone’s time to prosecute. Especially since, well, nothing happened.” He looks up at Ron’s face and tries to explain. “From what I understand – and this is just from what Val’s told me – there’s basically two types of energy in the grid. Active energy, which is useful, and reactive energy, which is not but can damage the grid. So reactive energy needs to be mopped up somewhere, and Actinide didn’t have enough ability to mop it up. But nothing happened with the grid, and all she could do was give Actinide a strong warning.”

Ron nods as if he understands. Another thing to ask Hermione. “And the case before that?”

Schwartz thinks a bit. “She’d spent a lot of time tracking down Nayarit boys, but they’re not violent.”

“Not violent?”

“Yeah, it’s interesting, their system. They’re kind of like heroin franchises, and they know the law damned well. They never carry a weapon, they never have too much heroin in any one car, and they _never_ use violence.” He pauses and starts from the top. “Starting about two decades ago, we began seeing boys – and they’re usually pretty young and undocumented – from the Mexican state of Nayarit come up here and sell heroin out of cars. Damned cheap heroin, too, and not watered down. Took us a bunch of time to figure them out, and they’re hard to stamp out – throw one boy in jail and two days later someone new comes up from Mexico to replace him. They have what are basically franchises across half the United States, and we formed a task force to take them out. Multiagency – FBI, DEA, local cops from half the US. And Val was just one of hundreds of people on that task force, one of many cops who went undercover to help sniff out these networks.” He paused. “It didn’t work, either. There’s no upper management with these Nayarit boys – just individual young men coming up north to try to make money, so taking out one cell just makes room for another. But they’re no cartel, and they don’t kill, especially not cops. They try to operate under the radar.”

“How did she go from a drug case to a case...investigating an energy company?”

“Red-teaming, but yes,” Schwartz shrugged. “Val was getting sick of undercover work. She wanted a case where she could go home at night, and the Actinide Energy gig came up.”

Ron thinks a bit; he barely understands what Schwartz is saying, and he can’t tell if the story Schwartz is telling is sensible or not. But he doesn’t have the background information to properly interrogate, so Ron lets this topic slide, moves on to the next one. “She was effectively homeless in 2003. How did she afford a house a year later?”

At that, Schwartz laughs. “We have amazing weather in Los Angeles. Plenty of tech bros live out of their cars so they don’t have to pay rent. It’s not uncommon. And the houses are her inheritance, Auror Weasley. ‘The money’ for her houses – both of them – are from her parents. Don’t quote me on the math, but from what I gather, the houses are in Val’s name but her mother pays the mortgage, and this way Val’ll pay less in taxes than if her mother just left her the money when she died.”

Raising an eyebrow sceptically – for one, this doesn’t explain the fact that Menendez didn’t officially live in either house or the fact that the two houses are in separate cities (although not _that_ far by Apparition). And he doesn’t believe that someone, anyone would be _voluntarily_ homeless.

“Ask her. Subpoena her bank records if you don’t believe me. L.A. has the damned best weather of the nation – it’s downright wonderful three-hundred-days of the year. Given the cost of rent, well, there’s plenty of young, reasonably-well-off men and women just kipping in their cars outside of work or in the parking lots of Walmarts.”

“She never lived in any of the houses.”

Schwartz shrugs. “She worked undercover a lot, and the car let her easily move her living space around. The department sometimes put her up in a temporary apartment, and she could always go back to her mother’s. I know she rented out the houses, and houses in those locations can get a pretty penny in rent.”

“She didn’t sell any of the houses when she left Alta California.”

“Well, that’d defeat the tax scheme, wouldn’t it? And property prices there are just up and going even higher; it makes no financial sense to sell. Also, well...” Schwartz pauses. “Val’s not going to stay in England forever. She’ll return to Alta California eventually.”

“How do you know that?”

Schwartz looks down at his hands, and then back up to Ron. “Look, I’m not supposed to be telling you this, but Val’s mother is not in the best of health. I don’t know what brought Val to England, but she’ll be back to care for her mother.”

Ron looks at Schwartz carefully, wondering if he should risk a _Legilimens_. But his impression is that Schwartz isn’t lying. He’s trying to defend his former employee; he might be carefully choosing which anecdotes he’s telling, but he’s telling the truth as he knows it. Menendez has probably lied to Schwartz, but Schwartz isn’t lying to him, Ron thinks. He continues his questions. “Is she Muslim?”

Schwartz makes a wishy-washy gesture. “No, but she’s sort of...vaguely religious. You know, the type that believes in God but goes to church only for the community. She’d follow her friends to mosque, probably.”

Ron nods. “Okay. Is there anything else you’d like to add?”

“Don’t let her play pickup Quidditch,” Schwartz replies. “She’s a damn good flier – all the former AF girls are – but not good at the rest of the sport, so she relies on getting opposing players to fly into things.”

 _Uh, wut?_ Ron blinks. He’s not sure what Schwartz intends by telling him this. Is he being serious? Is he trying to send a coded message? What the right hell? Ron stalls. “I’ve never seen her play. She’s never expressed an interest in joining the department team.” Menendez hadn’t really shown an interest in joining the department’s social events at all.

Schwartz nods. “As I said. She’s not staying in England. Val’s always been pretty athletic. There should be a sport.” He pauses to think. “Might be Muggle – she plays softball and soccer. But if she’s not integrating into society, outside of her wife, it means she’s not planning on staying.” He looks Ron straight in the eyes. “Look, I don’t know what you think you found, but Val’s a good person. We live very differently here in Alta California, and things that might seem odd to you are perfectly normal here. Now, any other questions?”

* * *

The letter found Draco Malfoy just as he got to the most finicky step of the incredibly finicky potion he was making.

He grumbles as he sets down the mortar and pestle ( _Six grains moonstone, freshly ground_ ) and, glancing at the distiller behind him to make sure nothing’s gone wrong yet, takes the letter from the owl. It bears the Ministry’s wax insignia, so while he really would rather finish this potion, a complexion potion middle-aged witches often paid enormous sums for, he must respond. He opens the letter, curses quietly under his breath, and resolutely turns back to the potion. _Damn Millie. Can’t she solve her own problems?_ he thinks as he removes the freshly distilled anise seed oil from the distiller. He slowly adds in the moonstone with his left hand and the freshly distilled anise seed oil with this right while the self-stirring cauldron stirred slowly, clockwise. The potion slowly fades from lavender to silver. Next, he carefully adds seven drops of mercury, stirring counterclockwise once in between each drop, making sure to take exactly thirty-seven seconds between each drop, and the potion develops a slight sheen. Good. It’s safe to leave it now, and he certainly doesn’t have time for the next step, which involves separating the potion entirely away from water vapour via magnesium and very, very carefully adding double-distilled sulphuric acid. He throws a Stasis Charm over it and Apparates to the Ministry.

After he gets past the creepy artificial secretary, Draco finds his childhood friend sitting in his childhood enemy’s office. “Minister Weasley; Coroner Bulstrode.” He offers his hand to each woman in turn.

Millicent Bulstrode had done well for herself after the War. Of course, it helped that her family hadn’t been directly tied to Voldemort, so they hadn’t lost most of their money to the Ministry. The Malfoy’s had been forced to give up almost everything – the Manor, the vast majority of their fortune, most of their reputation. But the Ministry couldn’t take their pride. Or Draco’s wife’s fortune. (The Greengrass family had managed to avoid prosecution. Somehow.)

“I have a case,” Millie says, “and I’d like your help on it.”

Draco looks back and forth between Millie and Weasley. “It’s about Potter, isn’t it,” he guesses. If it merits the attention of the Minister of Magic herself, it has to be about Potter.

The two women exchange a glance and that’s good enough to confirm it for Draco. “I’m willing to do it. But in return, I want a pardon for my father,” he says.

Again, Weasley and Millie exchange glances, but Weasley simply says, “Okay.”

 _Okay_? _Okay??_ She was supposed to decline, to turn down his services; he’d picked his ask because he didn’t think she’d grant it. She’d at least have to consult her husband, right?

“Okay,” Weasley continues. “I have a poison I’d like you to identify. If you can, I’ll pardon your father. Now, Bulstrode here will fill you in. I have to go.” And with that, she sweeps out of her office.

* * *

Ron gets back to the Ministry with more questions than answers. He knows full well that he doesn’t have much time before Menendez knows something’s up. A couple of hours at most. He will need to interrogate her. It’d be best if he had some good reason to, something he could stick on a warrant, but he’d proceed without one. After all, as he told Percy yesterday, he’d have his answers no matter what else happened.

His eyes fall on her desk, at the back of the bullpen. That was Auror property, and he could search it without a warrant. And it’s a desk. It shouldn’t take too long.

Menendez keeps her workplace neat. Case files are kept upright by a file organizer on the left side of her desk, and there’s a small potted cactus behind her lamp (and Ron is oddly reminded of that cartoon cactus in a sombrero), but other than that there’s nothing on her desk. (No picture of the wife, he notes. Not on the walls either - all Menendez has are a map of London and a map of Great Britain) The top-left drawer contains the pens NAC prefers over Self-Inking Quills. There’s also a stack of those sticky notes Muggleborn Aurors liked, a bottle of ink, a Sneakoscope, a hairbrush, and, strangely enough, a tin of snuff, which was more typically used by witches and wizards of a much older generation. The middle-left drawer has been enlarged but not by much. Just enough for some abnormally tall cans to fit inside. Those are a wild mess of colours and symbols: black cans with a large green “M” labelled “Monster”, yellow cans labelled “Yerba Mate”, orange cans labelled “x377”. There’s also a bottle labelled ‘No-Doz’ and a tiny metal tin labelled ‘Altoids’, and both have unlabeled pills inside. Finally, a bottle of brown liquid with odd things floating a the top labelled “Kombucha”, which he confiscates because what the right hell is this?

And then he opens the bottom-left drawer and groans. Because Menendez’s turned this drawer into a fucking closet, bigger than the room he had growing up. He can see dozens of jackets carefully hung up down there, pairs of shoes neatly lined up on racks, purses on shelves. There's even a lime-green couch with a knit throw tossed over it. It’d take _forever_ to look through this. Ron sighs, closes the drawer, and walks over to the right side just as Menendez emerges from the bullpen’s Floo. Ron gets a glimpse of a black mesh top and skinny, skinny black dragon leather jeans before her bright red Auror robes button themselves up over the outfit. Her hair is absurd, braided back on the sides in a fauxhawk and streaked through with purple, and as he watches, her facial features flicker, shifting slightly, as she removes the glamour she must have been wearing. A disguise then. He supposes it makes sense; anyone who saw her would probably not remember much than that purple-streaked fauxhawk.

Ron checks his watch. It’s not even noon; she’s not even supposed to be _awake,_  never mind doing...whatever she'd been doing, decked out like that _._ He wonders if Schwartz’s managed to warn her already.

“Deputy Head Auror Weasley.” Menendez comes up to him. “As I said – ”

 _"Expelliarmus!"_ He disarms her, aiming carefully at her face, which isn't protected by the Charms woven into the standard Auror robes. (He should have done this yesterday, but better late than never.) Ron watches Menendez’s expression carefully; he even risks a silent _Legilimens_ but all he gets are her shields, which are strong enough that he doesn’t think even his full-force _Legilimens_ can get through. Maybe Harry’s, but that wasn’t an option now, wasn’t it?

Menendez looks surprised and slightly wary, but Ron can’t detect any traces of anger. He tosses her wand back to her, reminding her, “Constant vigilance.” Let her believe that this was a test she failed. But if she was the Master of the Elder Wand, possession should have transferred to Ron. (Of course, there’s a chance that an accomplice was the actual Master, in which case Ron would have achieved nothing by disarming Menendez.)

Menendez ducks her head, looking abashed. (She does not attempt to disarm him, Ron notes. Interesting. He expects the Master of the Elder Wand to want it back immediately. Perhaps the accomplice theory does have more merit.) “Deputy Head Auror Weasley,” she says, again, “As I’ve mentioned before, I have an outside psychiatrist. I hope this suffices for the requirement...”

 _What the right hell was she talking about?_ But Ron’s used to conversations like this. After all, he has dozens of employees, all of whom seem to consistently forget that their personal matters were not the only thing Ron deals with every day, so guessing the context of conversations is another skill Ron's perfected over the years. He must have required her to see a Mind Healer after the love potion case, he realizes. It’s department policy: Aurors who go undercover have to see a Mind Healer after each case because it's too easy for the undercover persona to take over. The automated system must have been still sending her letters over it.

But that's not important; he ignores her words, focuses on the first thing he can think of that he can reasonably ask her without provoking her suspicion. “Why were you in Forensics last night?”

She sits down, opening the bottom-left drawer and summoning a different outfit from it – crème sweater set, tan trousers, low brown pumps. “I had a theory about the Wit-Sharpening case I’m working right now.” With a snap of her fingers, she swaps one outfit for the other and sends the previous outfit into the drawer.

“Which is?” Ron prompts.

“There’s nothing wrong with the Wit-Sharpening Potion. Well, there was nothing wrong with it when they bought it, at least.” Menendez summons what looks like a book out of the closet drawer. She flips it open, and Ron’s surprised to see page after page of hair extensions. Some normal, other wildly coloured. With a wave of her wand, Menendez unbraids her hair, removing the purple hair extensions and putting them back into the book. (A British Auror would have skipped this whole complicated setup and just Charmed their hair if necessary, but NAC Aurors tend to use more Muggle means. It made them less detectable to magical means, but it meant that they had to deal with the discomfort of Muggle disguise.)

Next, Menendez picks up her hairbrush and begins brushing through her hair. “Those Ravenclaws have been taking Wit-Sharpening potion all of last term and this one. It began to feel less effective, so they decided to doctor it themselves, see if they could make it more effective.” She sets the hairbrush down and the hairs on it catch fire, burning merrily with a bright purple flame. An anti-Polyjuice defence, probably. (A sensible one, Ron notes. He's had his own hair Charmed to deter hair thieves for years.)

“I was hoping Forensics could tell me a bit more about the potion they actually took,” Menendez continues

Ron sits on her desk. “Go on,” he says. (Most people didn't bother putting together detailed cover stories, so the more he questions her, the more likely her explanation will contradict or break down.)

She nods. “So. Muggles sometimes use some potions ingredients – some even have effects they can measure in their labs. Like coca, for example. Muggles used to chew the leaf to keep themselves awake; the leaves are used in the stronger variant of the Pepper-Up Potion. So they started wondering what other Muggle things could be potentiated in a potion, and they mixed a Muggle pharmaceutical with the Wit-Sharpening potion and got something unexpected.” With a wave of her wand, she pulls her hair back into a tight bun. “No one else who bought from that batch got ill.”

"And that was all?" he asks, although he hasn’t really been paying attention. (He doesn't really believe that was all she wanted to get from her trip to Forensics, anyway.)

"Yes?" She raises an eyebrow. "Couldn't find time to ask them during regular business hours, and no one was returning my memos."

Ron studies her face carefully. Under her thick foundation, she looks exhausted. He's not sure what he's looking for. Someone with as good of shields as she has won't show deception in their face anyway. “You look like shite,” he tells her. “What’s been going on?” He pitches his voice towards ‘concerned boss’ to avoid raising her suspicions. Hopefully, she’ll just open up and confess, but if not, he must not make her suspicious enough to bolt.

Menendez removes some of her makeup with her wand and then charms on different makeup – subtler, and somehow the shape of her face looks subtly different. “Just lots of people to interview during business hours,” she says.

No such luck, then. Ron raises a disbelieving eyebrow. “I could force you to take a vacation,” he says, as she stands up, swaying a little. She blinks, twice, obviously suppressing a yawn.

“I’m fine,” she insists. "I'm fine."

Ron hits her with a Sobriety Charm.

He’s not sure what he expected (the Sobriety Charm cleared out all foreign substances from the target’s blood, not just alcohol), but he’s not expecting her to start dry-heaving. She catches herself on her desk, pulls open the middle drawer and retrieves one of the “M” cans. Next, she takes out a pill from both the Altoids tin and the No-Doz bottle, and washes down the pills with whatever’s in the “M” can. “Christ,” she says. “Christ. Give me some warning, next time?”

The Sobriety Charm’s unpleasant, certainly, but not this unpleasant. No, this is caused by something leaving her system unexpectedly. “I’m taking you off all your cases,” Ron tells her. “Go write up all you have, then see me in my office.” This should buy him time, he thinks, and it's a reasonable enough action given the circumstances. He needs to talk to Hermione, so he turns around, heading towards the Floo.

“It’s just ibuprofen and caffeine,” she says, quietly. “It’s not...”

He turns around to look at her. “It’s not what?”

“Vigilance,” she breathes. When he shows no sign of comprehending, she adds, “Modafinil.”

He doesn't recognize that either, but he knows how a concerned boss should reply to an admission like that. “As I said,” he replies, “you’re off all your cases. Get to writing, now.”

On the way out of the bullpen, he analyzes the conversation he just had, reconsiders, and sends out a memo to the Records Department. It’s a gut feeling again, but his gut feelings tend to be correct.

* * *

It doesn’t take long for Hermione to set him straight about the kombucha. Apparently, Muggles just had weird beverages; Menendez apparently could have purchased it from a ‘Whole Foods Market’.

Ron tells Hermione about his theory – about how it’d almost certainly take an Auror to commit such an evidence-less crime, and how so much of Menendez’s past seemed nonsensical. Hermione’s less-than-convinced. “A _Fidelius_ is quite difficult to break. It’s much more likely it’s someone Harry or Ginny whitelisted, and Menendez hasn’t been in the country for long,” she points out.

“So she paid off a grocery-delivery boy,” Ron replies. “She doesn’t necessarily have to be the actual person who did it, just the mastermind.”

“And she’d have to trust this grocery-delivery boy to surrender the Elder Wand to her? Your hypothetical grocery-delivery boy isn't getting much out of this deal. What stops him from taking the Wand and running?” Hermione replies. “Can you even do a voluntary transfer of the Elder Wand?” She glances off to the side – she must be looking at Harry. “Figures,” she says, eventually.

“What did Harry say?” Ron asks.

“We don’t know, but there are no known cases. He hasn’t found anyone who’s surrendered the wand intentionally yet, and he’s been looking. You said that she didn’t react when you disarmed her?”

“Yes, but...” But Ron can tell Hermione’s no longer paying attention. She walks over to her desk and signs. “Thaddeus Parkinson. I probably should let him in.”

Ron nods, heading towards Hermione’s private Floo. When he gets back to his office, he sees the memo he expects – Menendez had gone to the Records Department and pulled the floor plan to the Ashcroft mansion. He sends her a Patronus. _If you’re going to search the Ashcroft place again, at least have the decency to bring me along._

* * *

Thaddeus’s face is the colour of a tomato. He looks angry, but then again, his face is almost always this colour. “Someone broke into my home last night,” he tells Hermione. “I demand that your husband look into this.”

Hermione pales. “Certainly,” she replies. But what goes into her mind is this:

  1. The fact that Harry’s dead is not a well-kept secret. Draco Malfoy managed to figure it out, after all. (May have to disclose to  _Circumspect_ immediately.)
  2. Menendez was nowhere near the Parkinson’s place last night. Either she is entirely uninvolved with this mess (and Ron's off trailing a false lead again), or she has an accomplice, or
  3. This is a bigger mess than what Hermione originally thought. She doesn’t quite know how the Parkinsons are involved yet, but she suspects something connects them to Harry's death.



She knows it’s not Serdyuk; she only gave him the assignment this morning. But she doesn’t know why someone would break into the Parkinsons’ home. But this was something the DMLE could go and find out.

* * *

Menendez and Ron Apparate to just outside the Ashcroft mansion, Ron’s wedding ring buzzing to tell him there’s a message from Hermione. He ignores it for now – he doesn’t want to check it in front of Menendez, doesn't want her to know about his and Hermione's messaging system.

As for the Ashcroft mansion, Ron’s not sure what he expected, but he certainly hadn’t been expecting a small  _castle_. He asks Menendez about it.

“The Ashcrofts have been living here since the 8th century,” she says. She looks a little better now, he notices. More awake, at least. “One of the oldest pureblood families in England.” She unlocks the front door with an _Alohomora_ and steps inside. “They snagged up this City of London property ages ago and have been living in it ever since.”

 _City of London_. Not “London”, but “City of London”, a little enclave independent of the rest of London since 1075. You can roughly guess the age of a pureblood family based on the location of their home. Only the oldest pureblood families owned property in highly dense areas since in order to do so, one must have acquired the property before there were too many Muggles living nearby. The Blacks, for example, lived in London proper. (The Malfoys had given up their London home in favour of a Wiltshire one. Apparently, the air was better.) But a City of London home was rare indeed; he wonders if a pureblood family would be willing to pay a pretty knut just for the location. Whoever inherited from the Ashcrofts would receive a fortune.

“You worked the case, didn’t you?” he asks. “Despite the fact that your godfather is their son?”

Menendez blinks, slowly, probably wondering how he managed to figure that out. Damn. He considers volunteering a lie but decides that’d just raise her suspicions more.

Finally, she sighs and heads further into the house. “Yes,” she said. “I worked it because of Laurie.”

He follows her, looking carefully at the inside of the manor. It's been redecorated since the 8th century, obviously. While Ron has no clue how 8th-century fashion appeared, he can tell the mansion's current style is straight up Victorian. Someone's installed drywall and added wainscotting, and there's plenty of paintings, although strangely none are of people, and he won't be able to look at any of them carefully if he wants to keep up with Menendez. “Mind elaborating?” he asks Menendez as they make a right into a sitting room of sorts.

“Look. Laurie’s the last Ashcroft, and I wouldn’t do this for any other case.” Menendez makes her way around the room, looking very carefully at the walls. The room is incredibly ornately decorated, with knickknacks crowded on every surface, but she’s not paying attention to any of them, Ron notes. He wonders what she's looking for.

“And?” Ron prompts, injecting a little  _stern boss_ into his tone. It's _such_ a violation, working a case when you have personal connections, and he can use that to press her.

“Henry and Margie have been cooped up in this mansion, talking to absolutely no one, since the eighties. They literally have no connection to the world except for their one son, who wouldn’t actually want to know the truth.” She’s moved on to the next room now, some sort of parlour mostly painted blue with blue furniture and blue accessories. “And, well, I knew his parents weren’t quite right in the head, and I suspected...” She pauses to pace up and down the room, looking carefully at the floor plan.

“You suspected...?” She wants to speak, Ron realizes, wants to tell this story. He just needs to keep her talking.

“Well, after Laurie turned out to be a...a Squib, his parents blamed each other. That blame calcified, turned them inwards. And then...well, eventually it got too much, and they killed each other. Got into an argument, magic went a bit haywire, that type of thing.” She’s already moved on again, now into another hallway, and now she’s looking carefully at the walls in the hallway. Ron guesses, from what he knows of old houses, that he's getting closer to the private rooms of the master and mistress of the house. They're past the public rooms, the ones used to entertain guests, and now they're headed towards the center of the castle.

Menendez turns back to look at Ron. “You can see why I didn’t want Laurie to know this. He’d be devastated. And...well, and as he’s the only person with any connection to his parents; well, there’s no point making all of this public, yeah?”

Ron considers this. He does see her point - it's the type of scandal no family wants. But he also wonders if this would affect the inheritance laws. Inheritance laws in the magical world were quite complicated, however, with multiple layers. Firstly, if there was a will, the will must be followed. (Unless, of course, the will ran into other laws regarding inheritance.) But if there wasn't a will, and Ron knew the Ashcrofts had died without a will, it'd fall to a family's bylaws, and Ron didn't know what the Ashcrofts' bylaws were. He decides to play dumb a bit, try to see what she thinks about how the mansion will be inherited, since what Menendez believes is more important than the truth if he's trying to fish out a motive. “No point making all of this public so Laurent can inherit?”

She shakes her head. “No. The bylaws prevent him from inheriting. Entirely.”

Ron scrunches up his forehead as if he’s thinking. “Rule of perpetuity?” The rule of perpetuity prevented the deceased from using legal instruments to constrain the living for more than 21 years, he knew, and it wasn’t relevant here, but it’s a common instrument used by young purebloods and half-bloods to challenge pureblood bylaws in court.

Menendez shakes her head again. “No. Because the bylaws can be changed by the head of the household, it doesn’t hit that clause. And that clause is about limiting requirements on the heir. It can't create an heir. There is literally nothing anyone could do to make Laurie inherit this house.”

“Because he’s a Squib?” Many pureblood families had a clause in their bylaws that prevented Squibs from inheriting.

Menendez pauses and shakes her head again. She sighs. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Laurie’s not a Squib. He had normal magic until he was about fifteen or so, and then it faded. He can still do some very limited spells, so it’s easier to just say that he’s a Squib. That’s why he can’t inherit. It’s in his blood.” She pauses to think. "Laurie's the last Ashcroft, and he's not likely to marry and have kids at this point, but I'd appreciate it that factoid didn't get out."

Ron pauses. He’s heard other purebloods mention something like this. Something about how marrying into impure blood might cause children who looked normal up to adolescence. But then they’d lose their magic and thus, the family would lose an heir. He’d always thought it was pureblood nonsense.

But Menendez had no reason to lie about this, he thinks. And  _"in his blood"_ is absolute, unchangeable; she sounds utterly certain that neither she or Ashcroft can finagle their way to an inheritance. And if she can't...Ron might not know the Ashcroft bylaws, but he knows that if those can't produce an heir, the mansion goes to the Ministry afer a year. That year was almost up, he realizes, and the fact that no one's made a claim by now probably means the Ashcroft mansion - and their entire fortune - will become the Ministry's in...what? A little over a month?

If Menendez wants this house, she doesn't have much time. Ron follows her through two more hallways and a room with a piano in it, and then she stops in the middle of a hallway (this one is burgundy with heavy wainscoting) to check the floor plans. She pulls out her wand and runs it over the wall and a door appears.

Ron raises an eyebrow. “You knew this was here.”

She waves the floor plans. “Area unaccounted for,” she says, opening the door and entering.

Ron pauses, leaning against the doorframe. Most wizards would just use wizarding space if he wanted more rooms in his house, but the Ashcrofts hadn’t. They’d actually moved walls around, apparently, assuming Menendez hadn’t lied about how she found this hidden room. But why?

The room was decorated very differently from the rest of the house, and by “decorated very differently from the rest of the house”, Ron really means, “decorated by a teenager.” There are posters everywhere (Menendez takes her time examining a poster of a woman in a swimsuit and legwarmers), the bed isn’t made, the desk is a mess, and there’s still laundry on the floor. The dresser has two drawers open. One has clothing spilling out of it (mostly dark colours, he notes, a bit of camo). The other looks half empty.

Menendez is kneeling by the desk chair, carefully applying a black powder to the armrests. Next, she takes a piece of tape and lifts a fingerprint from the armrest.

Ron might be a pureblood, but he's not entirely ignorant of Muggle ways. He knows what a fingerprint is, knows about the databases Muggles have full of different fingerprints. Why did Menendez come all this way for a fingerprint? “You couldn’t ask him for a fingerprint?” Ron asks her.

Menendez blinks at him, then throws him a look. “No. Of course not. You go around telling suspects they're suspects?” she snaps back.

Ron pauses. He knows she's lying; he just doesn't know about what. Yet. He doesn't say anything else, but he does make a copy of the fingerprints. She shows no sign of realizing what he'd just done, he thinks, but with an _Occlumens_ you can never be sure.

* * *

After they return to the Ministry, Ron steers Menendez to her desk with clear instructions to finish her reports and go home to bloody sleep. Then Ron returns to his office and checks his inbox. The first is from Hermione, and Ron pales as he reads it. Apparently, someone had broken into the Parkinsons’ home last night, and Thaddeus Parkinson had turned up to the Ministry to yell at Hermione about it.

Menendez hadn’t been anywhere near the Parkinsons’.

Ron pulls her Trace to double-check, nope. _Maybe this break-in is entirely unrelated_ , he wonders. It could be. The Parkinsons' are still quite wealthy and still in possession of their magical artefacts. But for the first time in two days, he wonders if he’s narrowed in on a suspect too quickly.

Then he flips to the last page in the Trace to check on what Menendez is currently doing, and his heart skips a beat. She’s writing a letter, to David, and instead of writing it by hand, she’s using a typewriter. Menendez is an Auror; she knows how the Trace works. But there are some details to the Trace that have been kept back, just in case. It’s known that the Trace knows where you are, what you say, and what you write. It’s less known that the Trace also gathers other methods of communication. Sign language, because it uses the same parts of the brain as speech, comes in as well. The Trace could also pick up on telegraphs and typewriters, Ron knew, but these details are held back from the rank-and-file Aurors.

And Menendez was using a typewriter. She must know about the Trace or at least she suspects she's under one. She’s clearly trying to get around it. Ron thinks of the way she wrote those letters, the way she used references and acronyms to confuse. Had she known then? 

And if so, what had tipped her off?

Ron sighs. He's starting to suspect that he needs to interrogate her, sooner rather than later. But first, the fingerprints. The Ministry keeps a working relationship with Scotland Yard, so Ron asks them to take a look. He tells them that the prints were found on the site of a murder, which is technically true.

* * *

> `Dear David,`
> 
> `Run these for me? Love, Val.`

* * *

“The vice president [Dick Cheney] looked at me gravely and said that, as I could plainly see, the program [Stellar Wind] was very important. In fact, he said, ‘Thousands of people are going to die because of what you are doing.’

‘That’s not helping me,’ I said. ‘That makes me feel bad, but it doesn’t change the legal analysis. I accept what you say about how important it is. Our job is to say what the law can support, and it can’t support the program as it is.’”

~(then Acting Attorney General) James Comey, _A Higher Loyalty_.~

* * *

“During the [Revolutionary War], the New York legislature had passed a series of laws that stripped Tories of their properties and privileges. The 1779 Confiscation Act provided for the seizure of Tory estates, and the 1782 Citation Act made it difficult for British creditors to collect money from [American] debtors...Other laws barred Loyalists from professions, oppressed them with taxes, and robbed them of civil and financial rights.”

~Ron Chernow, _Hamilton~_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **AN** : Just FYI, John Yoo is also the torture memo guy, so…
> 
> As for Valerie’s wand: there’s no symbolic meaning there, I just picked a [tree native to California](https://www.treepeople.org/sites/default/files/pdf/treemap/Common%20Trees%20of%20LA.pd) and used the Harry Potter wikia for a [North American magical creature](http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Thunderbird). Didn’t seem right to give her a wand made from European materials given that she’s from Los Angeles. I mention this because it’s typical for wands in the HP universe to have great symbolic meaning, and I wanted to note that this is not the case here, because this fic runs on subtle hints.
> 
> Also on the artistic license front: while the 75th Infantry (Ranger) is real; Company R is fictional. I don’t want to write in real people, so I’ll usually use fictional branches of real organizations.
> 
>  **Books** : _Dreamland_ by Sam Quinones, which is a great book on the American opiate epidemic. _From Cold War to Hot Peace_ by Ambassador Michael McFaul, which is basically his memoir, but I’m mostly looking at the points where he worked with pro-democracy NGOs in Russia, and for the Arab Spring bits. And speaking about the Arab Spring bits: as this is set in early 2010, the Arab Spring hasn’t happened yet, Daesh (aka ISIS) hasn’t formed yet from AQAP, there hasn’t been a coup against Erdogan, the Reset of Russian-US relations was still going great, and Snowden’s leaks don’t happen until 2013. I mention this because I’m trying to write characters who don’t have the benefit of hindsight, and when in future chapters I have small-d democrats praising Russia, I want you to know that they’re thinking Medvedev, not Putin.
> 
> The _Fidelius_ decaying if the Secret Keeper spent time in the protected space I added because otherwise the _Fidelius_ is too overpowered. ( _Veritaserum_ being beatable is canon; I believe JK Rowling once said so in an interview. As for _Avada Kevada_ , it can be blocked by physical items in canon.)
> 
>  _The Ministry v. Kayla Brennan_ will be another story in this set, tentatively titled _Veela Panic_ , which is my take on fanon Veela. It’ll feature: fanon Veela, a headstrong Muggleborn who isn’t going to put up with that shit, vaguely Victorian purebloods, and a young legal system that’s just beginning to develop its norms. Oh, and another take on the _The Ministry v. Sirius Black_.
> 
> The various regions of NAC get their names from early colonies in their respective areas: [Alta California](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_California) is a Spanish province that used to cover most of what’s currently the southwestern part of the United States. [Roanoke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony) is the Lost Colony. As for New Avalon: [Avalon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Avalon) is the name of a British colony in Canada, but I assume Avalon is a real place in the HP universe, so New Avalon it is, then. It can join New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, etc. in the collection of “this is how Brits named colonies”.


End file.
